TTNG emerge from their slumber as if encased in amber; alternatively, the bitch is back!

When Alexisonfire put out Otherness in 2022, I was ecstatic. Until I listened to it. Their music meant so much to me when I was younger, the raw, emotional, visceral qualities were what drew me in and what keeps me coming back to those albums to this day. But Otherness did something different; it showed their age. Normally, when a band gets back together after a long hiatus or disbandment, even if they come back as the same musical group, they don’t usually function as the same musical unit anymore. Thankfully, this is not the case with Juggling Moves (Beginner). TTNG are back exactly where they left off.

Now, there might be something to be said for innovation, for changing how or what you play to suit where you are in life as a musician or what concerns motivate you at the time. That’s all fine and good, but for a fifteen-minute sign of life, that’s not what I’m after in the slightest. I just wanna know that the band I loved can still do what I loved them for. Save the innovating for the albums. There’s nothing new from TTNG in this EP, but nothing new is possibly the best new material I’ve heard from a millennial comeback band in a long time.

The EP opens with the bombastic Goose Steppin’. From the get-go it’s clear that the Collis brothers have been practicing: Tim’s guitar and Chris’s drums flow into each other so nicely that you might almost believe this would be a pleasant song, and then the lyrics start. “Hey, son! This feels significant. Trading on our ideals, the grift has just begun.” These lyrics take on a different valence now that the band members have families and children. The title’s reference to Nazi goose-stepping seems to take aim at the global rise in fascism. The lyrics take the form of a father’s plea to his son, asking him, with an uncertain level of sincerity, “Who am I to blame for the state of everything?“

The next track, Adieu, is a fantastic breakup song. Lyrically it’s not much different from their earlier material, and musically it features all the hallmarks of any good math rock song. Guitar parts that weave so well you can almost picture the riffs as knitwork. Changing time signatures, grooving drums. No old man writing here, this is the kind of song you could put on if you broke up in high school or you just divorced your partner of 30 years. This is what you came for.

The closer, For So Long, No Longer, is a song about conflict, and the lyrics reflect the kind of grown-up attitude one might expect from job-having, family-having adult men. The intro is nearly a minute and a half long, and the rhythm is shaky enough that it almost sounds like it’s going in fits and starts. Just as you’ve had enough of the instability, Stu’s beautiful voice comes in and gives us a leg to stand on. The chorus is where we find a real change from standard emo lyrics,

“In fighting hate with empathy,
I’m confirmed in my belief,
That kindness changes everything”

This is old man writing done right. The music is exactly what you’d want or expect from them, but the lyrical maturity is evident, and I can’t say I’m mad about it in the slightest. This is a fantastic EP. I only wish that it were a tad longer, but hey, that’s what an album’s for!