WRABEL’s earlier work, “The Village” and “Based on a True Story,” was deeply personal and unflinching. With “up above,” he looks outward, exploring love, impermanence, and the fragility of being human. The album balances tension and tenderness, intimacy and vastness, expanding his emotional reach.
A key influence on this record is Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario, which helped shape WRABEL’s ideas of scale, fragility, and duality. Even for listeners who do not know the book, the music’s weight and intimacy remain immediate.
The album opens with light. Not the flash of a warhead but the soft glow of a Sunday morning. Cars moving through streets. People walking. Birdsong. This is where WRABEL places the listener. Inside the ordinary world that the scenario never lets its characters inhabit. They are too busy with codes, countermeasures, and the scrambling of aircraft. The album pauses on the moment they never had. The last quiet minute.
This is the album’s architecture. It does not depict the hellish explosion but the silence before it and the question that silence makes urgent. How much more does the person you love matter today?
Ethereal textures. Floating melodies. The drums are arriving like a heartbeat catching up to itself. The catastrophe is always just out of sight, imminent in the split second between then and now, and what remains is the choice to stay near and take it all to heart.
Knowing the book changes the listening a bit. It reveals the depth of the frame. It shows how far WRABLE traveled to arrive at such intimacy. It transforms the album from a collection of songs into a response, an echo, a prayer sent back across the distance between a journalist’s warning and a songwriter’s living room floor.
The album is about gathering. It is about agreement at the most fundamental level. We are here. We matter to each other. We have only this moment and the choice of what to do with it.
photos / Dana Trippe
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