Fourteen years after their last full-band album, Okay Lindon return with the record that finally gets to carry their name. 

“The lineup of this record is a reunion of the version of Okay Lindon most people know that played constantly across the region between 2007 and 2012,” says Dustin Smith. “What eventually wore us down back then was that none of it seemed to pay off, not for how hard we were working. We were spread eighty miles apart, I had this meticulous writing and recording process, and we were chasing this flawed idea that being perfect was how we’d stand out. It all just kept compounding without much to show for it, and eventually broke us. In the fifteen years since, we’ve stayed close but scattered with everything from new bands, limited cassette releases and solo shows, to hired-hand gigs…..whatever kept us playing, and reunion talk never really went away.”

The self-titled Okay Lindon is the fourth proper full-length from the Cincinnati band, and the first to feature the full five-piece since 2012’s Everything Will Work Out Fine. It serves as both a reintroduction and a vindication: a melodic, searching, unpretentious Midwestern rock record from a group that sounds less like they are trying to recapture something than finally trusting what was there all along. 

The first three Okay Lindon LPs, released between 2009 and 2012 and mixed by Jason Martin of Starflyer 59, were tracked meticulously and with great care, but with members now spread across 60 miles of Ohio and Kentucky, the reunion started almost by accident. Singer Dustin Smith proposed a simple structure: meet the first Sunday of every month, bring one mostly-written song, and see what happens.

Everything was tracked live in guitarist Chuck Smith’s basement with no isolation and no second-guessing. Two sessions in, it was clear the process was working. What started as a casual experiment turned into a full album. 

“I’m middle aged and a dad now, and I needed a different way to split the organizational load that I used to bear myself, writing, recording, booking, marketing, all the stuff I’d made my own job alone in the first place,” Smith explains. “So, I pitched something simple. I’d show up once a month with a song already written, chord sheets and everything, we’d write and rehearse for two hours at guitarist Chuck Smith’s home studio, then record live the last hour. It was supposed to be a scrappy little reunion experiment, three or four songs, free download on Bandcamp. After the first two songs we had this sense of magic, like, hey, this way of doing things is really working for us.”

The resulting record has the looseness of a band playing in real time and the confidence of people who no longer need to prove they belong in the room together. It’s guitar rock with a human pulse: melodic enough for fans of Starflyer 59, Land of Talk, The Frames, or Pedro the Lion, and rooted in the same unhurried Midwestern sensibility that made those first three records worth owning in the first place. 

“Our most active years can be characterized by this flawed idea I had that we needed to record everything isolated, perfectly performed and to a click track, and that would make us feel like a ‘real band.’ Our last record from that era took almost two years to finish. We also spent too much energy defining ourselves by what we weren’t than what we actually were.

“This time, writing this fast didn’t leave room for any of that. The process forced us on autopilot, causing us to naturally fall back on the stuff we’d honestly been running from for years.. the church music some of us grew up playing, the deeper chord extensions of 90s grunge bands like Stone Temple Pilots, the Midwestern emo that dominated the scene we cut our teeth in as teenagers. We stopped worrying about what Okay Lindon was supposed to sound like. For the first time there’s no gap between the record and live shows. It just sounds like us now. That’s the real win here and why we went self titled for this one.

“That’s clearest on the record itself. ‘Pinto vs. Pinto’ is a vibey shoegaze song. ‘Bootstrap Lovers’ is this bouncy, mixolydian blues-rock jam. The other six songs live somewhere in between. No matter what era of the band you’re talking about, that’s what we’ve always been made of, texture, sticky melodies, jazzier chords running under everything. This time it just came out the most naturally it ever has, because we weren’t trying to force it into any particular shape, we just didn’t have time to. We pride ourselves on being a band that can pull off that kind of range, and this is the most cohesive record we’ve ever made, which is strange considering we got there by a process that forced us not to try.”

Okay Lindon arrives July 24 via Lost In Ohio on limited edition Petrol Blue vinyl. Purchase it here.

Catch the band live at Blind Bob’s in Dayton, Ohio, on August 1.

Photo courtesy of Odinsauga.