When Florida alternative rock band Anberlin called it a day in 2015, front man Stephen Christian moved from the Sunshine State to a small town in New Mexico called Corrales. Though he’s since moved back to Florida, the time he spent that little town had a profound effect on him that remains with him to this day. That’s why, even all these years later after leaving it, Christian has decided to pay tribute to New Mexico on the fifth Anchor & Braille full-length, which is not only named after the state, but whose 14 tracks capture its heart and soul. Just by listening to it, you can tell much of a cherished place it remains for the songwriter.

“I didn't realize how much it became a part of me when I was there,” he reflects. “So even though I moved back to Florida in 2018, I have a huge affinity for New Mexico—I want to eventually move back, and I told my wife that I'm going to die there someday. I just fell in love with it. This entire record is based around that four year experience of being there. I just absorbed the culture there, and it will always be a part of me.”

In seeking to fully encapsulate the essence of New Mexico, Christian began writing a very specific type of music –the only kind that he thought could do justice to his beloved former home, but which he felt didn’t really exist. He calls it ‘spaghetti Western indie rock’. Producer Chad Carruthers—who also worked on Anchor & Braille’s 2020 album, Tension—calls it ‘mariachi gospel’. Either way, Christian was conscious of not turning such a heartfelt tribute into an over-the-top novelty record, but rather one filled with nuance. It contains tasteful elements and shades of that past life, but isn’t completely overwhelmed by it.

“The Southwest is part of who me and my wife are,” he says. “It’s not like a fad or something. So making these kind of songs just made sense. It felt right. I’d never really heard a spaghetti Western indie rock record. I’ve looked for them, and there is dark country, but I didn’t hear what I was looking for. So I was just like ‘I’m going to freaking create it! I have the resources so I might as well go do it!”

That’s precisely what he, with Carruthers in tow, did. The record opens with those spaghetti Western atmospherics underpinning “Drive” as a narrator’s portentous voice lays out the foundation, setting and tone for the journey that follows, and also closes the story out on the final track. What makes that particularly special is that the voice guiding the listener into the heart of this album is Christian’s father. “My dad is a huge cowboy fan who loves Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger,” he says. “When I was a kid, I remember him trying to watch The Lone Ranger and I was so upset because I hated it. But after I wrote this music, I called my dad and asked if he could read this in his best spaghetti Western voice,and he crushed it. I think it's so cool that he begins and ends the record. It just felt it just felt right. It felt full circle. I can't wait for 40 years from now to put the vinyl record on, spin it and hear my dad's voice again.”

Between the bookends of his dad’s voice, an entire world unravels that tells a deeply personal but also incredibly universal tale. “Drive” flows seamlessly into “Sweet Jesus Knows”, an up-tempo mixture of punk and post-punk, melodic and prog rock,that flits effortlessly between genres as it fizzes and crackles with intention and energy. But this being an Anchor & Braille record –a project where Christian is afforded more sonic freedom than Anberlin –it doesn’t stop there. “Stones” is a sumptuous slice of angular, electronic pop-rock, “Slow Burn” a hauntingly beautiful trip into pain and darkness and “Real Life” a buoyant anthem about trying to survive the drudgery of existence and day jobs. Elsewhere, “Backlands” and “Rattlesnakes” both explode with a sense of hope despite the times–Christian regards the charged,dark stomp of the latter as his favorite track on the album –while “The Weight Of 1917” manages to cast that mariachi gospel aesthetic in both the past and the future simultaneously, as Christian imagines himself trying to survive in a world from over a century ago set to a mesmerizing electronic beat. Its musical style jars heavily with the graceful desert rock of “Coralles”that follows, but it also makes perfect sense in the narrative of the record, highlighting the coexistence of contradictions on this record –the darkness and the light, the past and the present, the sense of home and the weight of loss.

There’s also the trinity of “SOZO Uno”, “SOZO Dos” and closing track “SOZO Tres”. These three songs of healing not only tie the record together, but offer a glimpse into the circumstances that led Christian to New Mexico. For while Anberlin are now together again, the band’s dissolution was the reason he went there in the first place. Having been in that band since the age of 16, the break-up caused him to do a lot of soul-searching.

“When you're a full-time band,” explains Christian, “you slowly become that role and identity. I was Stephen Christian, and that became who I was for 13 years. So getting that detoxification of your ego is what transpired in New Mexico, and that's why it was very much a place of healing for me. We left on very good terms, but it's still a very emotional roller coaster to have lived so much life with those individuals. To have that almost divorce –even though it was mutual divorce –was still very hard. And those three songs came out of a place of healing from that."

To that extent, New Mexico is Christian leaving his past behind by immersing himself in it, both physically and emotionally. It’s an album that looks back as it steps forward, and which sees Christian reconcile the two as he relives his memories from there and then in the here and now. Doing so not only helped him in his personal journey of healing, but also gave him one of the most rewarding recording experiences of his career.

“I have not had more fun creating music on a record, maybe in my life,” he says. “It was just so much fun to create. These songs are all internal dialogs I've had with myself, where I'm trying to figure out how I can help someone if they're having the same thoughts or the same anxiety or the same worries. Because if they are, hopefully they can find a little bit of solace in these in this music.It’s supposed to be a full-on immersive experience. I want people to explore this place and help them feel at home, no matter where they are.”