Indie Rock Songwriter J. Mamana Announces 'For Every Set of Eyes' LP with First Single "Hope Saved July"

For Every Set of Eyes, J. Mamana’s second full-length album (out August 23, 2024 via Holy Family), emerges luminously out a four-year period of turmoil and disillusionment for the songwriter, bearing the hallmarks that made his debut of critical and cult interest.

Recorded with Seth Manchester (Lingua Ignota, Model/Actriz, Mdou Moctar) and mastered by Heba Kadry (Björk, Big Thief, Cass McCombs), Mamana ornaments his songs with contrapuntal strings, mournful horns, bilious vocal harmonies, ecclesiastical synths, and plunked piano and classical guitar. The arrangements are a testament to Mamana’s attention to detail — it literally opens with a fugue for string quartet — evincing his “talent, vision, ambition, [and] precocity,” to quote Jayson Greene’s Pitchfork review of his debut, Nothing New in the West, but now with a refinement that comes from patience, effort, practice, and time.

If Nothing New concerned itself with the sweep of history, then For Every Set of Eyes peers inward at the singer. The stories Mamana tells on this record are, broadly speaking, autobiographical, and they concern the sudden death of his best friend to overdose at age 26 and the subsequent end of his four-year relationship.

It is not for nothing that Mamana named this record after a lyric from Neil Young’s On the Beach (“I never knew a man/could tell so many lies/He had a different story/for every set of eyes”). If Highway 61 Revisited was the tentpole reference for his first LP, then Young’s “Ditch Trilogy,” with its gloom, air of hopelessness, and dirt-black humor, is the spiritual forbearer to his second.

Many artists have made crisis records, Mamana claims, and are no better for it. Rather than to wallow, Mamana endeavored to use this record to explore the ways that loss of life and loss of faith often resolve, yes, in anguish, but also in a weirdness bordering on the transcendent.