Absent Sounds: Welcome to Absent Sounds. Each week we dive into our favorite records, and Winnower has arrested us since we first heard it — it's been hard to top on our list this year. So congratulations on holding the top spot, because it hasn't been beat yet.

Nay: Thank you.

Absent Sounds: We wanted to start with the album cover, because it ties the whole record together. Where did that image come from?

Chris: It's a photo I took on a disposable camera in Japan in 2017, when we were on tour. We got invited out to a rice farm for a reggae festival outside of Nagoya — this kid was just being a total goofball and I took the picture without even looking through the viewfinder. It came out wild. It had been framed on my wall for a while and it just felt right.

Nay: I had originally had this other idea — I was going to have my mom dress in traditional Filipino clothing and go dance out at the Pedernales River outside of Austin. And then I walked into rehearsal and saw that photo and was like, that should be it. The rest of the album design I did myself. I learned Blender, did some 3D art, and found a Filipino type designer who works in baybayin — traditional Filipino script.

Absent Sounds: And where does the practice of winnowing itself come from for you, or the interest in it?

Nay: It's about getting rid of the non-essential things. I was thinking about it in relation to rice, and to my mom — there are these traditional baskets in the Philippines for separating the hull from the rice. And I thought it was beautiful because our very first studio song, Shepherd's Clock, we made a bunch of wind chimes. We put energy into something and then the earth took it and put its own energy back in. Winnowing is like that — the wind is participating, speaking.

Absent Sounds: I love how that carries through the record — harmony between the members of Hikes, harmony with the earth. You mentioned the Pedernales River. Are there other places that have carried something for you while making this?

Nay: Yeah. Claire and I moved to Portland for a little while and started the record there, but we didn't finish it. The band took a break for a couple years, and then we decided to get back together and went back to Austin. We recorded with Dan Dazinski out in Dripping Springs, in the direction of Pedernales, where I go out once a year by myself to camp and write. A lot of the natural sounds came from Portland, and then the studio was out in the Hill Country. We decided as a band to be way more hands-off in the writing process — I came in with demos and we didn't give ourselves much time to arrange before going in. Some of it was written in the studio.

Chris: This album was written so much more for the studio than for a live context. Most of our catalog up to this point had been really granular — every little bit under a microscope, tweaked relentlessly. This felt a lot more effortless. We were able to let go and trust each other, and I think it's a product of where we are as friends and where each of us is individually. Less to prove. I don't think any of us have the space in our heads or hearts for that kind of perfectionism anymore.

Nay: And even within our genre — a lot of people throw us into the math rock category, but we wanted to grow out of that. I write songs because I have a lot to say lyrically, and we needed a better platform for that. Even the recording approach was less surgical — room mics, natural drum sounds. What we're getting is what we're getting.

Absent Sounds: That brings us into the album itself. Persimmon opens with the line "felt like I owe this to my younger self." What do you owe to a younger version of you?

Nay: It's a return to form. The story comes from Claire and I having a really hard time as artists individually, and this person came up to us in a co-op parking lot and gave us a box of persimmons, and it totally turned our day around. That return to innocence — I felt I owed that to myself after working so hard and so rigidly. I owed trust to myself, and trust that the world would take care of things. There's another line: "a wounded world still keeps nurturing."

Chris: That's my favorite line in the whole album.

Absent Sounds: Mine too.

Nay: That comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer — an indigenous author who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass. That book had a huge impact on Claire and I.

Absent Sounds: Is there another moment in the record where everything comes into sharp focus for you? For me it was somewhere around Winnower — after the line "why be thorough when I could burrow," something shifts.

Nay: Totally. Winnower is the precipice where I find a lot of resolve. And actually, that was the first song I wrote for the record. I was in New York working for another band, and Hikes was, as far as we knew, broken up. I wrote that song and at the end I'm saying "I just wanna let you in, I'm falling for the world again." When I finished writing those lyrics, it wasn't long after that I called Chris and said let's do this again. I found the answers to everything in writing that one.

Absent Sounds: Math rock can sometimes feel like the focus is so much on instrumentation that there's not much room for vulnerability. How do you leave that space open, especially when there's a lot going on musically?

Nay: That was really intentional. We'd had so many songs where we were shredding on top of singing, which is so hard to pull off live, and I don't realize it until we're out there — like, why did I write lyrics over this part? With this record, we just needed to leave more space. And I stripped a lot of the deeply poetic stuff to make it a little more direct, so people wouldn't have to guess so much and could dive into their own feelings more easily. I grew up loving Tallest Man on Earth and Fleet Foxes, and sometimes the poetry is gorgeous but you can't quite find yourself in it. I wanted to leave a door open.

Absent Sounds: Let's talk about Sana All — because that song feels less like a mantra and more like the impetus for everything you guys do. And I'm curious how it relates to doing things DIY without becoming jaded.

Chris: The not-getting-jaded part — we're coming back to this after years away, so it's been a very intentional choice. This band means more to me than it ever has, but there's less riding on it now. We came back with the express intention of doing this for fun, because it's how we know how to be friends. With that explicitly at the forefront, it's a lot easier to just say, this is fun. We've all held this band in so many different ways over the years, and this is the only way we could do it right now with how busy we all are. And it works better, cosmically — it becomes more effortless. We've learned all the things not to do. We found the lines by crossing them many times.

Nay: When we took the break, I started playing with a number of different groups — one was Black Belt Eagle Scout, an indigenous artist. Being in those spaces, playing near reservations and things like that, I saw music in a completely different light. I became resolute that it is a good thing for the earth. And I was like, oh — the thing I've dedicated the most time to that I'm trying to run away from right now is actually the answer. I also played with Reyna Tropical, who was representing a lot of voices of people who kind of looked like me. Seeing them transform grief into joy through community was massive. And that leads into Sana All — I wrote that song originally for a split with Into It. Over It., around the time a lot of Asian hate crimes were coming into the open, when the fire was being stoked. I was afraid for my mom's safety. Sana all is a Filipino phrase — instead of saying "I'm jealous of that," it's like "I wish that for all." That's what the song is about. And we ended up putting it on this record because it's my favorite song we've ever written. The first time we thought, let's just push the fader until it's this big thing, without changing too much. It just builds on itself.

Absent Sounds: I appreciate how your music lifts the grief rather than sitting in it — there's a shadow side, but the light is what carries. And I wanted to go back up to Morning Pages, because you're talking about all these different ways of moving through the world — being around indigenous communities, seeing people who look like you experience the world differently. Are there any tangible rituals that help you get back to that place?

Nay: A return to nature was the biggest thing we got from Oregon. But what we also lost there was community — we toured so much that it was impossible to make friends. Nobody even knew when we were home, and we had a really miserable time. Coming back to Austin, where we had touring friends who understood that lifestyle, removing that isolation made it so much easier to get to that place of calm. To tap back in.

Absent Sounds: The last track, To Belong, is the longest on the record. What does belonging look like for you both right now?

Nay: I got that song ready for a solo tour opening for Black Belt Eagle Scout, and when we got the band back together I thought, this can really reach people with Hikes. I'd spent a lot of years digging into my Filipino identity, my mixed Filipino identity. And I think a lot of people are doing this right now — digging into the subgenres of themselves — and in some ways it's making people more isolated. Because you're constantly thinking about where do I fit in instead of how do I just exist as myself. Not to say that exploration isn't important. But at that time in Oregon, I was also considering transitioning, and I thought — I can write this down in a way that's so straightforward that people can resonate with it and feel like they belong through it. Like, if everything else went away and it was just a room full of people singing together — at least there's one place somebody can belong.

Absent Sounds: Then everyone belongs there tonight at the show. Thank you both so much — this record is a real gift.