“I got tired of sadness/ I got tired of all the madness/ I got tired of bein’ a badass all the time,” Matthew Houck sings on “Revelator,” the opener and title track of his latest Phosphorescent album. Houck was actively looking for something new, an epiphany, when the old ways stopped working. And just as the album Revelator only revealed itself to its author along the way, so too did real life revelations take their time answering the plaintive mission statement with which Houck reintroduces Phosphorescent. The last time we heard from Phosphorescent, it was after a five year gap between Houck’s 2013 breakthrough Muchacho and 2018’s C’est La Vie. His life had changed drastically: He had left New York City for Nashville, had children, survived a nearly fatal bout of meningitis, and re-built his recording studio from the ground up. Now, another half decade has passed, a period that while quieter, has proven no less complex, with Houck traversing murkier spaces and the blurry mists of time. “This record is a lot more open-ended and ephemeral,” Houck explains, noting the more plainly autobiographical documentation of C’est La Vie has been upended by something less knowable, more unsettled. The underlying melancholy of Phosphorescent’s music remains, reframed by the weird headspace of long-term fallouts from the last few years. Revelator might promise a fresh outlook, another horizon, but first the album wrestles with an ongoing, ambient sense of dread.” – Phosphorescent