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Today Paper Pools, the solo project of LA’s Allen Orr, announces its proper debut album, Everything, due May 29. Last night, the first single from it, “NightDays,” premiered on KROQ.
“‘NightDays’ confronts mortality head-on. I wrote it while my father was in the hospital, managing cancer and then Covid — a stretch when we weren’t sure he was going to make it. I spent night after night sitting beside him, caught between fear and hope, pleading with him to hold on so we’d have more time — time to reconcile, to talk, to simply be father and son.
The refrain “in the night, in the day” repeats like a mantra, mirroring the rhythm of hospital time — the endless alternation between light and dark. “Keep playing that sad song” became a kind of double message: keep living, keep the music going, even as the melody turns bittersweet.
The opening electric guitar enters dry, distorted, and raw — exposed in a way that feels almost uncomfortable. As the song unfolds, that starkness begins to shift, widen, and take on dimension. In the second verse, a Prophet drifts underneath, hovering at the edge of perception. By the final chorus, everything swells with deep low-end weight — an undercurrent that pulls the song forward, as if time itself were accelerating.
When I wrote it, I didn’t yet know I would soon have twins of my own. A few years later, he came to Los Angeles and met his only grandchildren. That arc — from hospital room to new life — reshaped the meaning of the song. It became less about fear of loss and more about continuity.” – Allen Orr
Bio:
For Allen Orr, uncertainty is a gift. Since the Los Angeles artist, producer, and designer’s last release as Paper Pools, his life has shifted on its axis. Central to that is the birth of his twins, Poppy and Roan. Anxiety and excitement braided together while he and his wife awaited not one, but two fresh sources of overwhelming joy and ever-shifting chaos, and their arrival occasioned massive changes to his priorities and artistry. It’s been a season of reflection as existential questions swarmed his head. But rather than get bowled over by the turbulence, Orr has come out the other side with newfound purpose and a different sort of clarity. “When you’re younger, you hope to set a direction and say, ‘Life is going to go that way,’” he says. “As you get older, you realize you can’t control much of it — the journey becomes more important.”
That unpredictable path led Orr not only back to Paper Pools, but to the project’s debut album, Everything, which captures the intense self-searching of this period both in spirit and in sound. Across nine tracks, he ventures from the sunny analog warmth of songs past toward something more mysterious and complex. It’s a swirl that metabolizes disparate sounds and sources of inspiration to forge a tension between atmosphere and rhythm: delicate dream pop and drippy reverb in the vein of Slowdive; knife’s edge rock riffs that recall The Stone Roses; buzzing programming that approaches Nine Inch Nails’ bleeding-heart EBM. Altogether, the set is both sweeter and more abrasive than anything he’s released to date. Everything is full of contrasts and conflict and, when you zoom out, the thrill of possibility even in the heaviest moments.
Orr writes movingly across the LP from a meditative headspace, laying out a dense topography of landscapes both physical and emotional. On “Grey Skies,” he reflects on growing up along the rocky coasts of Galway, Ireland, and of a desire to one day show his children the place that made him who he is. Over a thunderous bassline — an homage to bands he was listening to in his teenage years, like the Stone Roses — images from the distant past and an unknown future swirl together into a blissful, bleary collage. It’s comforting, even if there’s an unease lurking in the more cacophonous corners. “You can experience both happiness and sadness at the same time, and that’s okay,” he says. “That just means you’re human — that you’re living life.”
The album-making process was also deeply tied to this self-searching. Shortly after he released 2022’s It’s in Our Mind, an EP of aqueous psychedelia and windows-down indie rock, Orr was invited to France for an artist residency led by Grammy-winning producer Shawn Everett (Julian Casablancas, The War on Drugs, Alabama Shakes). The experience was “transformational” to how Orr works, introducing him to a visceral process he describes as “running things through things” — turning every bit of recorded audio, every vocal take, every lilting guitar line into raw material for studio experimentation.
The magic comes from taking these bits and processing them through layers of effects or arcane machinery. What results is an approach that merges the roles of artist and producer — Orr functioning much more as an architect of his complexly rendered materials than as an engineer. Everett ultimately mixed the record’s title track, but Orr brought this way of thinking to the rest of the record, which he recorded and mixed himself.
Making Everything became an exercise in testing the limits of his songs. As he tinkered in his studio, he learned not to get too tied to a piece’s original shape. He had reference points — he was listening to a lot of the music that inspired him growing up, from Slowdive to Nirvana — but the result isn’t beholden to these inspirations, in part because of the metamorphic nature of his approach. When he treated the parts with various tape machines, he always found something unexpected. New sounds and emotions lurked beneath each existing melody and rhythm, lending fresh light or shadow to each song once he brought them to the surface.
“I never would have guessed that the LP would feel how it does right now,” Orr says. “When you’re open to new possibilities, in music or life, you end up really surprised with how beautiful the thing you weren’t expecting can be.” As a result, Everything is at once familiar and new — you can hear whispers of shoegaze, Screamadelica, and earnest alt-rock if you listen closely to, say, “A Field of Poppy,” an open-hearted tribute to his daughter. Still, each track also bursts with a life all its own. It’s a testament to the power of following the long road wherever it takes you.
That openness has led to other new experiences, too, like scoring the short film Brush, which screened at Outfest, SoHo International Film Fest, and Wicked Queer, among other festivals. In some ways, it’s a different skill set learning to “tell somebody else’s story,” but in others, this kind of work is central to what Orr’s been doing as Paper Pools. In his own projects, like Everything, he’s charting his story and finding ways to do so that feel widescreen, emotionally resonant, and true. Orr’s deepest gift is in the assuredness of his convictions and path. Everything feels less a culmination of what he’s explored to date than it does a doorway to something totally new. -Colin Joyce, 2026
Photo by Melissa Gore
Paper Pools
Everything
(Self-Released)
Street Date: May 29, 2026
Pre-save it HERE
Track List:
A New Path
Grey Skies
NightDays
Gentian
Forever
A Field of Poppy
This Light
25 Years
Everything
PAPER POOLS LINKS:
