photography by Stephen Agustin
What happens to our dreams of the future when the future itself becomes harder to imagine?
Perhaps we simply begin to imagine differently. Less in grand promises and perfect worlds and more in fragments: a place we would like to return to, a person we hope will still be there, a version of ourselves we haven’t met yet. The future has always been partly fiction anyway — something built from memory, longing and whatever we choose to believe might still be possible.
It is somewhere inside this space that The Fourth Wall find Memories of the Future, their new nine-track album. Rather than offering answers about what comes next, the Portland-based five-piece seem more interested in the strange relationship we have with tomorrow: how we romanticize it, fear it, escape into it and sometimes look backwards in order to imagine it at all.
The ideas behind the record reach into philosophy and science fiction, including the writings of Mark Fisher and Fredric Jameson and their thoughts on our diminishing ability to dream beyond the structures of the present. But beneath those references lies something much more intimate. Memories of the Future is also about desire and imagination, about the stories we construct to move beyond where we are now.
Stephen Agustin tells us about the thoughts and experiences that slowly shaped the record:
“The ideation and writing of Memories of the Future happened during a time when the world was sort of ‘normalizing’ after a global pandemic. We were being asked to return to our usual grind, to accept the same systemic precarities that set the stage for all of the vulnerabilities that came alongside a world-wide crisis. Though Covid-19 certainly brought a lot of our apocalyptic anxieties to the foreground, it was also a time of utopian dreaming. We were attempting to navigate our way out of a doomed timeline. Though we may have since regressed into our nationalistic and individualistic tendencies, there was a brief moment where we dreamed of global collaboration, equality, universal health care, etc. Our new album asks what becomes of the latent energy of our utopias deferred?
Memories of the Future, in some sense, took several years to write and began before we finished our last record, Return Forever (2024). I perhaps needed some distance from the moment itself to write about it, but the years following the Covid-19 pandemic was a bit like witnessing the world enact some sort of repetition compulsion. Similar to Freud’s observations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, were we hoping that repeating our traumas would somehow allow mastery over it? With this record, I wanted to dwell in this imaginative space between our utopian impulses and our efforts to actualize, or defer them. I wanted to investigate not only history’s lost futures, but the strange desire for postponement. I drew a lot of inspiration from Science Fiction, or more accurately literature about Science Fiction, because I was always captivated by this statement attributed to Frederic Jameson and later to Mark Fisher, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It was used as a way to explain the massive production of dystopian fiction in recent times, but also led to a contemplation of other deadlocks in culture, our reliance on the ‘nostalgia mode,’ and the impoverishment of our post-capitalist imaginings.
The songs of Memories of the Future attempt to embody this sense of longing. Somewhere amidst the despair of capitalist realism, there are haunting echoes that recall our lost futures. We relied on choral-like voices and orchestral instrumentation to try to capture the transcendence of utopian wish-fulfilment, but also there are vulnerable and sparse moments that allude to the emptiness and despair of our times.”
“Our new album asks what becomes of the latent energy of our utopias deferred?”
The album was made in The Fourth Wall’s basement practice space on Portland’s industrial east side, an area where remnants of old manufacturing buildings sit alongside new development. It is a landscape suspended between what was and what might be — not unlike the album’s title itself.
And while writing these lines, I press play.
Zeno’s Paradox opens the record with something almost cinematic. It feels less like a conventional beginning and more like an invitation, slowly preparing you for what is to come. And what follows is an album that asks for your attention, but also rewards it. City Lights Receding has something instantly familiar about it, the kind of song that seems to carry the spirit of a classic without trying to become one. Then there is Entropy, bringing a certain lightness into the journey — a moment where the record seems to open up and breathe.
It is this movement between weight and lightness, fullness and emptiness, that makes Memories of the Future feel immersive. You don’t necessarily have to know all the philosophical ideas behind it to enter its world. Sometimes the music gets there first.
That relationship between memory and the present has long existed in The Fourth Wall’s music. The band’s story began far away from Portland, on Oahu, Hawaii, where songwriter Stephen Agustin grew up. His father was a musician, and when Agustin was ten, he took him to see B.B. King. Soon afterwards, he wanted a guitar of his own and began making music with friends. Years later, The Fourth Wall would take shape, eventually relocating to Portland and building an audience while sharing stages with artists including The Shins, Andrew Bird, Menomena, Band of Horses and Typhoon.
Across the years, their music has continued to circle questions that rarely have simple answers. Their previous album, Return Forever, turned towards family history, migration, identity and the gaps that remain when parts of our own past can no longer be fully recovered. With Memories of the Future, the gaze shifts forward — yet memory remains close behind.
Musically, the band describe themselves simply as melodic noise-rock, but their world has always been wider than that definition suggests. Agustin has previously spoken about bringing elements of film scores and contemporary classical music into pop structures, alongside the layers of noise, melody and distortion that have become part of the band’s language. On the new record, he once again takes a deeply hands-on role, writing the lyrics as well as producing, recording and mixing the album.
One of its central songs, Kármán Line, takes its name from the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. Its starting point is the story of American daredevil and amateur rocketeer Mike Hughes, whose homemade steam-powered rocket crashed in 2020. But within the song, his attempt to leave the ground becomes something larger: a story about spectacle, escape and that very human urge to go somewhere beyond the limits of an ordinary life.
And perhaps this is where Memories of the Future becomes most interesting. Not as a record predicting what awaits us, nor as a lament for futures that never arrived, but as a reminder that imagining something else still matters. Because the future has never been only about what lies ahead. It also lives in what we imagine.
