Somewhere between past and future, anxiety and catharsis, electronic pulses and raw guitar riffs, "Lemuria" emerges - an album that feels like reading someone else’s dream journal only to realize it mirrors your own subconscious.

Optometry - the Los Angeles duo of electronic veteran John Tejada and singer-songwriter March Adstrum - crafts an album that is both intimate and otherworldly, a "musical diary" that processes the weight of a turbulent year. Where their debut, "After-Image", thrived in remote collaboration, "Lemuria" was born in shared physical space. You can hear it in the way Adstrum’s ethereal vocals melt into Tejada’s synths, how every guitar riff and drum hit sounds like a conversation rather than an afterthought.

The album title invokes myth - Lemuria, a lost civilization said to have vanished beneath the waves, an Atlantis for the spiritually inclined. It’s an apt metaphor. These songs feel like remnants of another world, half-remembered and submerged in nostalgia, yet also forward-facing, urgent. There’s a line from "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" that served as a guiding light for Adstrum: “Thinking about the future but talking about the past”. That duality haunts this album, where memories dissolve into digital textures, and heartbreak is processed through oscillators and tape delays.

Musically, "Lemuria" is as fluid as its conceptual underpinnings. It flits between post-punk urgency ("99"), trip-hop noir ("Comets"), shoegaze lullabies ("Inside a Wire"), and fractured electronica ("Fear (is the Mind Killer)"). The duo’s ability to blend analog and digital, acoustic warmth and synthetic sheen, creates a space where no sound feels static.

Tejada’s fingerprints are unmistakable - his beats are crisp, his synth work meticulous - but Adstrum’s presence transforms these tracks. Her voice is a spectral force, sometimes a whisper, sometimes an ache. On "Another Shield", a song dedicated to her grandfather, her vocals shimmer with quiet grief, while "Bon Voyage" turns a farewell into something that feels oddly celebratory, like dancing on the ruins of what once was.

Then there’s "99", a standout track that punches through the haze with bit-crushed guitars and restless drum programming. It rejects the comfort of nostalgia in favor of something harsher, more immediate. It’s the sound of someone walking away from the past - not running, not mourning, just "moving on".

Beyond the music, "Lemuria" carries the weight of personal loss. Optometry’s longtime visual collaborator, Simone Ling, passed away in 2024, and in her absence, Tejada and Adstrum took on the album’s visual design themselves. That hands-on approach is mirrored in the album’s sound - every note, every texture feels deliberate, handcrafted, necessary.

For all its melancholia, "Lemuria" is not a funeral march. It’s a letting go. An act of reconstruction. A myth of a lost world, retold in flickering neon and feedback loops. And maybe, if you listen closely, you’ll hear echoes of your own story somewhere between the frequencies.