Name: The Main Thing
Brand: Real Estate

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

CD-WIG-426

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2020-02-28

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Domin­o

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

887828042623

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Total Cap

1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Real Estate

Genre US

Rock-Pop

Label US

Domino

American indie rock band from Ridgewood, New Jersey founded in 2008 by Alex Bleeker, Martin Courtney, Matthew Mondanile and Etienne Pierre Duguay. Jackson Pollis replaced Duguay on drums and Jonah Maurer joined the band on keyboards and guitar in 2011. In August 2020 Real Estate announced that Jackson Pollis was taking time out from the band and Sammi Niss replacing him as the band's live drummer.

Over the last decade, Real Estate have crafted warm yet meticulous, pop-minded music, specializing in soaring melodies that are sentimentally evocative and unmistakably their own. While 2017’s In Mind longed for normalcy against the backdrop of a life as strange as a touring musician’s. The Main Thing brings that longing to a universal and urgent place, acknowledging the anxieties inherent in protecting a quiet existence. What emerges is a superlative collection of interrogative songs as full of depth, strangeness and contradictions as they are lifting hooks. 

“I’ve got this family, and I feel this responsibility to gild this crazy world,” says guitarist, singer and primary songwriter Martin Courtney. The record’s most sentimental moments, then, are crystallized home movie flashes directed at Courtney’s children. “I can’t imagine what will be / in your earliest memories,” he sings on “You.” These mentions are set against darker realities; on “A Silent World,” he pleads, “Can’t let you wander off / Out in this wicked world.” Then there’s guitarist Julian Lynch’s first authored song for the band, “Also A But,” in which disembodied vocals intone “a poison bloom” and “mushroom cloud” apocalypse, set against sci-fi synths, unresolved guitars and propulsive drums. Instead of exploiting the juxtapositions between these opposing emotional modes, Real Estate embraces cohabiting contradictions. “It didn’t feel dark to me,” Courtney clarifies. “To me, it’s the normal stuff.” 

This duality is built into the arrangements themselves, interlocking emotionally with the nuance of the lyrics. “Gone,” about casting out toxic phantoms of the past, sets ominous descending strums against dirge-y drum machine before clearing the air with a lilting guitar lead. “Procession,” hallmarked by a bright, two-note motif set under shifting chords and beats, pits hometown pining against generational complacency. The effect is like gazing through a rearview mirror masked by fog, a sentimentalism so obfuscated you’re forced to look forward instead. “We create our own nostalgia. I’m constantly moving so I have more to reflect on,” explains Courtney. “If you look at the first record, it was a wistful feeling we wanted to explore. As we get older, the complexity has become more obvious,” adds bassist and singer Alex Bleeker. That’s paralleled in the album artwork itself; the band enlisted Bjorn Copeland of Black Dice, whose visual work focuses on recycling byproducts of consumer excess, to mimic the layout of Days. Bleeker describes their intention as “the understated Real Estate layout run through Bjorn’s pedalboard.” The effect is uncanny, reflective of this record’s astute self-awareness. 

A working title for Real Estate’s fifth album was Special Album. Instead, they settled on The Main Thing. In part, it’s a reference to the Roxy Music song: “Even before we decided where to record or who to record it with, I knew it needed to sound that good,” enthuses Courtney. “Which is an impossible goalpost, and a good thing.” But the “main thing” has another meaning for the group: a declaration of music making’s centrality to their own senses of self. “We discovered through the care and attention that we brought to this record that making music to resonate with other people is our catharsis,” says Bleeker. “The ‘main thing’ is following your path of inspiration, and hoping to inspire that in people around you. Hopefully the album itself will re-affirm peoples’ commitments to themselves and to each other, as it did for us.” Classic Real Estate reference points are still here – Yo La Tengo, Felt, Steely Dan – but they’re refined into hazier grooves, expanded into extraterrestrial sonic layers, deepened into slow-rolling phases. You can’t hit an impossible goalpost, but you can come close. Pouring all their hopes, dread, excitement, love and labor into these pristine arrangements, Real Estate made The Main Thing a special album indeed. 

The Main Thing

Music US

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