A Profound Non-Event＜限定盤/Green Vinyl＞

When Sydney outfit Daily Toll first surfaced in recorded fashion, it was with a series of rough, mostly outdoor, mostly live-to-device digital recordings, including their first EP, 2021s Its a Lot. Recorded in a day among natural sounds on Indigenous land with a handful of instruments in tow, including synths, accordion, mandolin, and bowed guitar, it revealed a duo (Kata Szasz-Komlos and Jasper Craig-Adams) figuring out how to capture things like existential angst, passion, monotony, and truth in musical form. Longtime musician and friend Tom Stephens joined the project circa 2024, and the trio signed with Tough Love Records for their first studio recording and full-length release. The newly updated lineup continues to try things out on the resulting A Profound Non-Event, an album that includes moments of somnambulant psychedelia, bouncy indie, rustic lo-fi rock, and angular post-punk, without ever seeming to favor a particular designation. Still immediate in nature, the album was captured in three days at Sound Recordings, an analog studio in Castlemaine, Australia, with Alex Bennett. It opens with the nearly seven-minute-long, meandering "Another World," whose title may or may not refer to the altered states of a spooky drug den. With very little modal movement but plenty of vibey soloing, it resets notions of patience and expectation, so that when the angsty, steadily driving "Fleeting" ("Its all just fleeting/Maybe theres a meaning") follows after, it seems turbo-charged, and songs with titles like "Im Bored" and "Mountain Song" dont seem at all out of place. Elsewhere on the album, "Easy Man" is almost boppy, and "My Sisters Loom" is an extended ambient-noise recording with dinked-out guitar, improvised flute, and clattering dishes. "Waiting Game" is a second seven-minute excursion, this time into a more melodic, 90s-derived rock, and high point and centerpiece "Killincs" (as the lyrics explain, Hungarian for "latch") is a post-punk half-rant steeped in alienation and isolation. When A Profound Non-Event eventually closes on the dreamily circular "A Light," it may not be clear where weve been or where its all going, but weve been taken somewhere, and the company was ace. ~ Marcy Donelson