Progressive Rock
Self-released · 1 October 2026
Track eight of Irrationally is called “This Is How Our Story Began”. It runs twenty-eight seconds and is followed by “Now It’s Over”. Putting the start of the story three tracks from the end, and cutting it to half a minute, is the decision the whole album turns on: several songs tell the same forbidden love and the same abrupt ending from different angles, and the band has given up on sequencing them.
This is the sixth Aisles studio album in twenty-one years and the first with Boris singing, after Sebastián’s departure. With Álvaro on drums the band had already put out two EPs: Bahamut, an instrumental suite drawn from a Chilean science-fiction novel, and Obras de Los Jaivas, a run through the psychedelic and folk rock of their own country sung by guests. Two records without a settled voice before they had one again.
Germán Vergara, who founded the band and writes the lyrics, and keyboard player Juan Pablo Gaete, who supplies most of the chords, took the group to a beach house in two stints five months apart. Gaete is candid about it: in the first the new singer was shy, and by the second he was pushing his own ideas. Bassist Daniel brought material of his own, and Adam Noble, who has worked with Placebo, mixed it.
“Now Is The Time”, four minutes flat, was played on the UK run of November 2025 before it was released. The band had never done that in twenty years, and said so from the stage every night. The album’s long stretch is saved for the end: “Think I’m A Ghost” and “Come Back”, both a shade over seven minutes, sit either side of the final third. The sleeve is by Jason Joyce, working to a brief with four compulsory elements and nothing else: a lighthouse, a crossroads, ants and love. Joyce spliced a desert crossroads in Death Valley with the frozen peaks of Verbier, and the lighthouse, solar-powered, acts as a time portal that breaks the figure at the centre apart. One of the songs is called “Lobsters and Ants”.
The reservation comes from the same place. The band says it’s after more direct, catchy songs now and that it values simplicity, and at the same time it lets the album’s non-linear telling rest on a twenty-eight-second spoken fragment, which is work the songs ought to be doing. The running times are unevenly spread, too: the middle stretch of “Took Me Years”, “Now Is The Time” and “Anywhere”, all between four minutes and four and a half, is the shortest material here, while the ambition is held back for the last two pieces. It is brighter than Beyond Drama, as promised, but the real playing happens in the final third and it gets there having spent half an hour on the shorter songs.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Guillem Cardós