Kevin Bronson on August 4th, 2020

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Over more than a decade, Faded Paper Figures have carved out a singular niche as indie-pop sophisticates — think of their five-album, two-EP catalog as AOR for academic salon nights.

It is pure irony that their new album is titled “Kairos” (an ancient Greek word meaning the opportune moment for an action or decision) and arrived squarely in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and a national social justice movement.

“We had grand ambitions, or at least grand for us, to do a bunch of shows along with the album release in July, but of course that got scrapped,” says singer-guitarist R. John Williams. “So, we’re no fan of this pandemic! We are, however, encouraged by the sociopolitical changes happening in the U.S. (many of them a long time coming). And it is encouraging to see how music continues to be a space for collective feeling, even if we can’t gather in large groups to hear it at a proper volume.”

Outside of the business of crafting heady pop songs from organic and electronic instrumentation, Faded Paper Figures have come a long way since their beginnings at UC Irvine: Williams is a tenured English professor at Yale and an author; Kael Alden, the jack-of-all-instruments and producer, composes music for film, TV and commercials; and singer Heather Alden is a doctor practicing family medicine. “This band has always been our release,” Kael Alden says. “It’s our escape from everything.”

With Williams based on the East Coast and the Aldens now in Salt Lake City, “Kairos” (the follow-up to 2017’s “Chronos” EP) proved slow to materialize. Yet it far exceeds what anybody would consider escapist fare. The song “She’s Walking Out,” blooming from Kael Alden’s cello, is an homage to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Album opener “Bones” is a bubbling, lyrically smart nostalgia trip about skateboarding.

Then there is “Cogitate,” which is built from the 1994 tape loop by neuroscientist and researcher Dr. John C. Lilly. Faded Paper Figures turn it into a sweeping pop song that meditates on human memory, and the new video directed by Merrill Aldighieri and Joseph Tripician invites viewers to put their thinking caps on before their headphones. If only science could always be this cool.

“Lilly set out on that experiment (as the video implies) as a way of illustrating just how powerful our minds are as ‘pattern recognizing machines,’ and we really believe that,” Williams says. “One doesn’t have to go quite as far down the rabbit hole as he did to realize that we’re all searching for ways of communicating with each other, and that we’re searching for new ways to frame our thoughts. We hope our music makes a space for that.”

It’s one of several moments on “Kairos” (it’s worth diving into its annotated lyrics page) that feel as if they were written for this moment in history. “It’s true, a lot of the tracks sound like we wrote them for this crisis specifically (“All That We Feel” almost sounds like an anthem for social distancing!), but most of them were lyrically in place by last December,” says Williams, who flew to Salt Lake City 10 times over a year to work on the album in the Aldens’ home studio. “Still, a lot of these national wounds have been festering for a long time, so it isn’t a surprise that what’s on our minds would get amplified by a massive pandemic.

As for Heather Alden, the arrival of “Kairos” has been particularly challenging. “Working as a physician during the pandemic has been a whirlwind, to say the least,” she says. “It’s tough to be expected to be an expert on COVID when the whole world is grappling with the constantly changing information, new studies, new cases and challenges.

“The album has been in the works for the last few years, and it has been a slow but steadily building excitement to release. But when COVID hit, it felt like hitting a wall. The pandemic became all-consuming for the first little bit. It wasn’t until a month or two later that I was even able to think about the album. Rediscovering it, along with just returning to a new normal, has been nice. It allows for much needed balance and brings me resiliency to the stresses of doctor life.”

||| Watch: The video for “Cogitate”

||| Also: Stream the full album here