If you focus hard enough, you’ll find the magic in the mundane. Living Hour’s Sam Sarty did, working as a movie theatre projectionist for over a decade, she learned to manipulate time. In a dark room lit by a red bulb, she conjured stories from the past to influence the present through a small glowing rectangle. In that same room, she penned her thoughtful observations, hoping to unveil life’s ambiguity. Similar to her resurrection of time via film screen, Sarty’s songwriting became a quiet wizardry, demonstrating the powerful cycle of observation, documentation, and projection.

On Internal Drone Infinity, the fourth album from Winnipeg’s Living Hour, time-suspension becomes something urgent and sacred. The band, vocalist-lyricist/multi-instrumentalist Sam Sarty, guitarist Gil Carroll, guitarist/vocalist Adam Soloway, bassist/keyboardist Brett Ticzon, and drummer Isaac Tate, has ventured far out from their initial dream-pop 2016 beginnings. The follow-up to 2022’s *Someday Is Today* is an amalgamation of folky slowcore, fuzzy indie-pop, and dreamy noise rock. It’s a balance of icy, melodic vocals; twitchy noise samples, warm guitar twang and screeching distortion, and chugging percussion. Sarty dubs it “yearn-core,” a fitting term for the nostalgic ache and sonic intimacy that runs through the album.

Internal Drone Infinity: a propellant urgency to fill in the gaps between time and space, how to be grateful for here, crave the over there, and reconcile the distance between them. Opener “Stainless Steel Dream” sets the tone: “Bloated, metal, summer, planning, remembering,” Sarty sings over scorched guitars. Our bodies, chemical, electrical, and emotional, are thrown into chaos that we seek to understand: “Like a shell inside another one/ It’s ambient, it’s harmony.” Sometimes life is simply too big for words, pulling us through its overwhelming beauty and terror. 

Details in the everyday become portals. A pink hair straightener is a baton calling back to middle school bullies, Victoria’s Secret body spray, and the beginnings of girlhood; a half empty beer can is a melancholic reminder that a night is swiftly passing you by; the growth of a haircut is a tangible alarm of wading through a breakup; the sound of a re-recorded fiddle translates the evolution of tumultuous relationship. On the steady-paced “Waiter,” Sarty considers the purpose of her crowded mind over a lazy river of melodic electric guitar. “Tell me where you think I oughta be / With this one body, and all it’s thinking.”

This poignant meditation on time finds its most moving expression on album closer, “Things Will Remain.” It’s the kind of wistful campfire song you’d play on the final night of a memorable trip with friends. “Things will remain and I will not,” Sarty sings. There’s a soft break in her delivery that’s cushioned by naked guitar strums. Visions of a melting landscape and a journey over a bridge are heavy with grief, one linked to disintegrating earth and our fading time to appreciate it. But it’s a marvel to think about what we leave behind.