Staring down an unbearable future, My Fictions returns from a seven year absence with Time Immemorial, six songs about dreading what’s to come. The band, consisting of bassist/vocalist Bryan Carifio, guitarist Tyler Bradley and drummer Seamus Menihane, has always created music as harsh, alienating and unrelenting as reality itself. From their vitriolic early EPs I Want Nothing and Always Trapped, through splits with bands like The Saddest Landscape and Aviator and up until their vicious full-length (and up to this point, finale) Stranger Songs, My Fictions has been indebted to bands across the spectrum of aggressive music like American Nightmare, Converge and City of Caterpillar. With Time Immemorial, the band sets a new path forward.

Time Immemorial started as a shot in the dark. A text from Bradley to the rest of the band, along with a demo of the song that would become EP opener “Psychic Readings,” sparked the first band practice in years. Over a number of weeks in a warehouse in Massachusetts’ Merrimack Valley, the rest of Bradley’s demos were hammered into a tight six song package. A new set of songs marked the close of this long hiatus, and with it came with a new sense of freedom. While one familiar with the band would pause at the use of a word like “optimistic” to describe anything related to the My Fictions experience, the opportunity to try new things and a new band doctrine of “why not” set in motion a plan to travel to Philadelphia and make a new record.

The EP was almost entirely tracked over a weekend in May at the Knife Lair with Wyatt Oberholzer - another new direction for a band.To this point My Fictions had recorded almost all of their music themselves with Bradley doing the work of engineering everything minus a single split release. This shift allowed the band to refocus on the songwriting process with someone else behind the boards. Songs like the first track “Psychic Readings” maintain the ferocity and tempo of older songs, but bring a new emphasis on structure into the fold, with what may be the band’s first ever chorus making an appearance. Faster ones like “Fallacy” and “Endless” are as chaotic as anything that the band has done before, showcasing drummer Menihane’s ability to navigate through breakneck shifts in tempo and tension. Tracks like closer “Sin Eater” and the title track “Time Immemorial” are mid-tempo reprieves that use Bradley’s droning, reverb-burdened leads to haunt over the equally bleak lyrics.

In the weeks following the band’s trip to Philadelphia, vocalist Bryan Carifio had time to rework his lyrics before recording the remaining EP vocal tracks with engineer and longtime gig accomplice Mike Moschetto. While the band’s catalog has been lyrically fixated on the past as a place to focus, Time Immemorial shifts to the not-so-bright future. “Nobody cares when prophecy fails,” laments Carifio on the record’s opening line, “they’re just hoping to find a good reason to die,” a lyric showing that the scope of his fatalist worldview has expanded past his own life in the time since the band’s last LP. An expanded worldview only adds to the sense of dread. Points of pain are no longer scraped from diaries or text messages - Carifio rather seeks out a greater explanation for suffering. The song “Oblivion” - inspired in part by the film First Reformed - is a full rejection of the idea that conditions, either on a personal or larger scale, are going to improve anytime soon. The song peaks at the end with the lines “I have to live with myself, but I can’t put that on someone else… I feel the weight of impending doom,

what else do I have to offer you?” a question acting more as an existential exercise than an actual inquiry about how to move forward facing the end of the world.

Formed right at the end of 2010, at this point My Fictions has endured over ten years of existence. Time Immemorial is a declaration that the next decade may not have much more to offer than the last. It offers a renewed sense of purpose - found somewhere between Cassandra’s failed, unheard warnings and Sisyphus’ doomed dedication to reach the hilltop - created by a band known for soundtracking life’s bleakest moments.