How can you love someone when you hate yourself? Who are we without the people we love? Do people see us for who we really are, or just who people say we are? Whether explicitly asked in their lyrics, or evoked through sound, Enumclaw grapples with these questions and countless others on their sophomore album Home in Another Life.

Off of Enumclaw’s new label home, Run For Cover Records, the album follows the band’s 2022 release, Save the Baby. Where their debut album exemplified the band’s knack for writing catchy indie-rock tunes in their own individualized style, their latest peels back the layers to reveal a new, more vulnerable, side of their songwriting.

“I just wanted it to be honest. I felt like everything before this record I wrote it in a really hopeful and inspired place and that definitely was not where I was at when I was writing this album,” vocalist and guitarist Aramis Johnson said. “With this record I was just trying to be true to what it feels like to live my life, the depths of my experience. One time someone I knew who I only really saw in social settings asked me if I ever got sad and I remember just going home and being like, what am I? A robot? And I think that’s a great representation of what this album is, is there’s more to me than meets the eye.”

Across the eleven tracks, Johnson gives an inside look into his search to understand himself and those around him. Lyrically he battles with the concepts of family dynamics, loss and the inevitable grief tethered to it, falling in love and out of it, and self exploration, all in the pursuit of depicting his life experiences as frankly as possible.

“In my experience you see this monolith of what experience is and it is so true to what it’s like to be a person but it’s never shown from the perspective of someone who looks like me and I think I was just trying [with the album] to add another thing into the zeitgeist of like, you can be a round person and not be white and from upstate New York,” Johnson said.

With leaning into authenticity comes being confronted with how others perceive you as well as how well you truly know yourself, as Johnson found while writing Home in Another Life. This realization informed the title of the album through another social interaction Johnson had.  While visiting a friend in London, Johnson found himself listening to his friend’s roommate talk about her coworker that she was interested in at the time. “She was like, ‘he’s like a home in another life,’” Johnson recounted. “I remember being like, what the fuck does that mean? And she was like, ‘it just means I feel like I’ve known him forever. I feel so comfortable with him.’ And I just thought that was such a sweet sentiment, I wondered if people would say that about me. And to me, all these songs feel really lived in in that kind of way, like these things were always here.”

Johnson explained that the phrase of “a home in another life” stuck in his brain while he was writing the album, and came to be a guiding mantra when exploring his own perception and self exploration on it. While trying to reveal a more expansive look into his life experiences and grapple with the perceptions that others have of him, Johnson found his own sense of what a home in another life can feel like.

“I feel like over the course of the time we’ve been a band, in my personal life there’s been all these things that’ve made me feel very invalidated…And I felt like, in all the characters on this record and all of my songs and all these people who have made me feel invalidated there’s a part of me that always knew I needed to listen to my gut instinct and I think in some way shape or form, across all of these songs I think that’s what I’m grappling with…I need to trust that people will see me for who I am and not who people say I am and that’s like a huge battle I’ve been fighting internally, that I can trust myself and I am a whole person, I’m not good or bad, I’m a person in the same way everyone else is and I should be able to find solace in that.”

At the end of the day, and the end of the album, Johnson may not have the answers to all the questions he raises. But through his songwriting, he stumbled upon his own feeling of a home in another life and for many, the same can be found on his band’s latest record.

Home in Another Life is out on Friday and you can pre-order it from Run for Cover Records. Follow Enumclaw on Instagram for future updates.

Photo courtesy of Colin Matsui