There is a particular kind of nostalgia that has very little to do with wanting to return to the past. It is closer to remembering how it felt to encounter something for the first time, before familiarity made it manageable, before the things that once seemed impossibly vast became neatly filed away in the mental archive. Bruno Silva’s latest album as Ondness seems to inhabit precisely that peculiar territory. "I Can Only Put So Much Into a Song" looks back towards the music that helped shape his formative years, but it doesn't behave like a retrospective, a tribute compilation or an exercise in recreating some supposedly glorious period of independent music. Instead, it approaches memory as an unstable substance, something that can be stretched, distorted, submerged and occasionally mistaken for something else.

Silva is hardly a newcomer to the business of making sounds misbehave. The Lisbon-based musician has been active since the mid-2000s, developing a remarkably varied practice through Ondness, Serpente and several collaborative projects. While Serpente has often explored more physical, rhythmically adventurous territory, Ondness has provided a space for a different kind of electronic imagination, one interested in the transformation of samples, fragments, melodic suggestions and sonic debris into something that feels both familiar and strangely displaced. Silva is also involved in Portugal's musical infrastructure as a programmer and producer at Espaço das Damas, and his work has appeared on labels including Discrepant, Holuzam, Ecstatic and Where To Now?. His musical vocabulary has never been particularly keen on respecting borders, and this album finds him turning towards guitars without abandoning the electronic sensibility that has informed much of his previous output.

The references behind the record are unusually revealing. Iran's "The Moon Boys", The Microphones' "It Was Hot, We Stayed In The Water", Fennesz's "Endless Summer" and the sprawling, communal aesthetics of the New Weird America underground form a loose constellation around Silva's memories of adolescence and early adulthood. There is also a persistent black metal shadow, less a matter of genre imitation than a source of emotional pressure. These are not simply names dropped to establish the artist's alternative credentials, nor does the album sound like a checklist of influences assembled by someone who has spent too much time browsing old record collections. Rather, they suggest a period when guitar music, homemade experimentation, noise, folk, electronics and extreme music could coexist without anyone feeling obliged to explain the arrangement to a genre classification committee.

The opening "Tevens" immediately establishes the album's unsettled character. Guitar tones expand into thick, reverberant masses, while the vocal presence seems to emerge from somewhere behind the instrumental surface. There is a recognisable shoegaze ancestry in the way sound accumulates and obscures its own details, but the result is more shadowy than blissful. The guitars don't so much invite the listener to disappear into them as suggest that something might be waiting on the other side of the distortion. "Vento Gelo Valentine" deepens that impression, its heavy chords and ghostly vocal gestures carrying an almost ceremonial quality. The song feels as though it has been transmitted from a distant gathering whose participants have long since forgotten what they were celebrating.

One of the album's most appealing qualities is its refusal to let this atmosphere become monotonous. Silva understands that a dense sonic environment needs occasional openings, and he introduces them with a lightness that prevents the music from becoming trapped in its own fog. "Celesting" and "Blisser" provide different degrees of movement and melodic definition, the latter introducing a more clearly electronic pulse into the guitar-led material. Its small, nimble synth gestures don't dismantle the surrounding haze; they simply give it something to move around. There is a quiet pleasure in this juxtaposition, as if a modest piece of digital machinery had wandered into an overgrown garden and decided to stay.

The album's shorter pieces also contribute to its unusual sense of proportion. None of the nine tracks is especially long, and the entire record lasts just under half an hour. That brevity is significant. Rather than stretching its ideas into extended atmospheric exercises, Silva works with compact forms that feel like recollections surfacing briefly before slipping away again. The titles " (muito pouco)" and "(quase nada)", which translate roughly as 'very little' and 'almost nothing', seem to acknowledge the limits of what can be retained or communicated. They are small interruptions, but they also point towards the album's central concern: how much of an experience can actually survive its conversion into music? The answer, perhaps, is not very much. But the fragments that remain can be remarkably evocative.

"Glideness" offers another subtle shift in perspective, its textures moving between melodic suggestion and blurred abstraction. There is a looseness here that recalls the more exploratory corners of early-2000s independent music, when the distinction between a song, a recording experiment and an unfinished idea could be pleasantly difficult to establish. Silva does not attempt to polish away that uncertainty. His production allows sounds to retain their rough edges, while the mastering by Carlos Nascimento gives the material a coherent presence without sanding down its more unruly details. The result is intimate but not fragile, with distortion functioning less as an aggressive gesture than as a means of making the music feel physically close.

Then comes "Megadawn II", a title that inevitably invites comparison with Silva's earlier "Megadawn", released in 2022. Here, however, the electronic elements are not simply a continuation of the producer's previous experiments. They become part of the album's broader recollection of a musical past in which the supposedly incompatible could sit comfortably together. Beneath its celestial surface, the track contains a restless rhythmic undercurrent, a reminder that Silva's interest in electronic construction has not been suspended in favour of guitar nostalgia. The closing "Tevais" returns to the album's opening atmosphere, with another substantial wall of guitar sound and an elusive vocal presence. Its position creates a circular impression, although not quite the comforting symmetry of a journey completed. It is more like finding oneself back at a familiar location and discovering that the place has changed, or that one's memory of it was never entirely accurate.

The album's title comes from Farrah Abraham's "My Teenage Dream Ended", a record whose strange collision of celebrity confession, synthetic pop and emotional dislocation makes it an unexpectedly fitting reference point. It also introduces a wry little contradiction: Silva may claim that there is only so much he can put into a song, but the nine pieces here suggest that the limitations of the form are precisely what make it interesting. A song cannot preserve an entire adolescence, reconstruct every first encounter with music or settle the complicated business of becoming an adult. It can, however, hold a few distorted impressions, a half-remembered melody, a particular shade of melancholy or the sensation of hearing something that seems to belong simultaneously to yesterday and tomorrow.

That is where "I Can Only Put So Much Into a Song" finds its emotional weight. Its nostalgia is not particularly sentimental, and it avoids the familiar trap of treating youth as an irretrievable paradise populated exclusively by excellent records and questionable haircuts. The past is present here as a collection of imperfect impressions, some warm, others abrasive, all subject to the distortions of time. Silva's achievement is to make those impressions audible without turning them into a museum display. The music remains open-ended, occasionally opaque and quietly restless, allowing its influences to dissolve into a personal language rather than arranging them behind glass.

There is something touching about an album that accepts the inadequacy of songs while continuing to make them. Perhaps that is the whole point: music cannot contain everything, but it can preserve the outline of something that would otherwise disappear. And sometimes an outline, especially one drawn with this much distortion, says considerably more than a complete picture.