Other Lives - For Their Love (LP) - Clear Vinyl

Other Lives have always chased widescreen moods, and For Their Love lands that feeling with calm confidence. Released April 24, 2020 on ATO Records, the band’s fourth album trims the excess of Rituals and leans back into the rustic, cinematic palette that first turned heads with Tamer Animals. You can hear the Stillwater, Oklahoma roots in the dust and dusk of these arrangements. You can also hear a songwriter’s patience. Five years between records is a long time for most bands. For this one, the quiet suits them.

The core appeal is intact. Jesse Tabish’s warm baritone sits in front like a campfire voice, steady and a little haunted. Around him, the group stacks strings, pianos, horns, and percussion in careful layers that nod to Morricone and baroque pop without turning into pastiche. The tempos rarely rush. The drama comes from space, from a timpani thud held just a beat longer than you expect, from a tremolo guitar that shivers like a desert horizon. Few contemporary bands commit this fully to orchestration as a storytelling tool. Other Lives still do, and they do it with craft.

“Lost Day” set the tone as an advance single. It is lean, melancholic, and quietly catchy, the kind of song that grows from a whisper rather than a chorus hook. That approach runs through the album. Melodies thread across piano figures and nylon-string guitar, then widen with woodwinds or a chamber string gesture. You feel movements inside the songs. Not grandstanding, just thoughtful staging. Fans who came aboard when the band supported Radiohead back in 2012 will recognize the filmic sweep. What’s different now is the control. Where Rituals sometimes sprawled, For Their Love keeps a tighter frame. The band trusts a single image, then lets it breathe.

Production-wise, the record favors organic textures. You can picture the microphones close to the piano hammers and the bow rosin rising off the strings. It sounds like a room and players facing one another. The group has long preferred to build music at their own pace and in their own space, and this album benefits from that care. It feels lived in. Tabish’s writing reads more personal too. There are flickers of frontier myth and widescreen vistas, but the camera often turns inward, asking smaller questions about devotion and doubt. It gives the record a sturdy center, even as the arrangements swell.

Critical reception picked up on the return to concision and mood. Reviewers called out the Ennio-adjacent color and the patient architecture of these songs, and how the band shaped orchestration into something intimate rather than grandiose. Spend time with the back half and you hear it most clearly. The band resists the temptation to go bigger just to go bigger. Instead, details take the lead. A brushed snare. A muted trumpet sigh. A wordless harmony that sneaks in at the edge of the stereo field. This is the kind of record that rewards late-night listens and quiet rooms.

On vinyl it blossoms. The low end has room to bloom and the strings feel three dimensional, which is exactly where this band lives. If you have been eyeing Other Lives vinyl, this is an easy add to the shelf. The pacing makes For Their Love vinyl a front-to-back spin that invites you to flip the record and stay put. If you like to buy Other Lives records online, you will have no trouble pairing this with their earlier work, and Other Lives albums on vinyl make a cohesive little corner in a collection. I’ve even seen copies trickle into a Melbourne record store or two, so crate diggers hunting vinyl records Australia wide should keep it on the list.

For Their Love will not chase you down the street. It is not in a hurry. That is part of the charm. Other Lives pare their language to sturdy images and let orchestration carry the weather, the way a good Western score does. Ten years on from their breakout run, they sound like themselves again, just a little older, a little more settled, still searching for a melody that lingers after the needle lifts. Put it on when the light is low and the house is still. It holds.