Sleepwalk Return with ‘Sandbox,’ Announce New Album ‘View From The Outside’
Chicago’s Sleepwalk have announced their fourth album, ‘View From The Outside,’ arriving November 13th via MNRK Heavy, and shared the first single, ‘Sandbox.’
It has been five years since ‘Underneath The Shade,’ although Sleepwalk haven’t exactly been quiet in between, most recently releasing the ‘Out Of Focus’ EP in 2024. The band itself has changed considerably too, with guitarist Tyler Gargula joining Ryan Davis in 2023, followed by Marcus Johnson on drums and Vic Ordonez on bass.
‘Sandbox’ feels like a good introduction to that version of the group, the cleaner guitar passages still carrying some of the haze associated with their earlier records, but the heavier sections land with considerably less blur around them. Gargula’s screamed backing vocals push against Davis’s more distant delivery, and the song keeps moving between those two temperatures rather than settling comfortably into either one.
Lyrically, Davis points directly at what was bothering him when he wrote it: “‘Sandbox’ is about our frustration with the normalization of conspiracy theory thinking that is proliferating throughout our culture as well as anger with the current administration/general MAGA movement.”
That frustration is there without turning the song into a speech, and ‘Sandbox’ works better for it, the lyrics circling a world where choosing your own reality has become easier than dealing with anything that might disturb it.
‘View From The Outside’ was recorded over twelve days at Earth Analog in Tolono, Illinois, the studio run by Hum guitarist and vocalist Matt Talbott. Sleepwalk worked again with Zac Montez, who also produced ‘Underneath The Shade,’ and the connection makes sense, particularly for a band that has always liked guitars to feel both physical and atmospheric.
The new record stretches that language further. Some songs lean harder into rock and post-hardcore, others leave more room around the guitars, and the closing track even moves into trip-hop territory. Davis describes the balance simply as “gloominess, hooks, and raw emotions,” which is probably more useful than trying to pin the whole thing to one genre.
The album title comes from the way Davis tends to look at the world from a certain distance, trying to pull back far enough to see human behaviour as part of something much larger. That idea runs underneath a record which begins in more political territory and gradually becomes more personal, touching on isolation, winter in Chicago, religion and the difficulty of getting outside yourself as you get older.
Live Dates
11/12 — Chicago, IL — Sleeping Village
12/03 — Denton, TX — Rubber Gloves
12/04 — Austin, TX — Bushy Street Commons
12/05 — San Antonio, TX — Paper Tiger, Side Room
12/09 — San Diego, CA — Soda Bar
12/10 — Los Angeles, CA — El Cid
12/11 — San Francisco, CA — Neck Of The Woods
Headline credit: Max Rubin
Sleepwalk Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
