There’s Only Going Back Now – behind the music
About the songs on Anecdata’s There’s Only Going Back Now, released October 2026. Listen to it in the player above or on the usual streaming services.
1. Better Vampires (Dog and Pony Show)
The album starts with a song written in early 2026 when there was serious speculation the prime minister was gonna ragequit and go back to just being a mediocre rich man playing golf in Hawaii, without having to run the country’s worst MMP-era coalition government and all the bullshit that goes with it.
It (the song) almost never happened – I wrote and recorded a demo of the backing track sometime in 2025 and completely forgotten about it, until it resurfaced in January/February 2026 and I thought ‘maybe there’s something to this’.
Then I wrote too many words, preventing myself from using the usual trick of copy-pasting the best chorus takes across the entire song, because every chorus had different fucking words. Took forever!
But it’s catchy, eh?
Wrote this one in 2025, experimenting with some sample-based guitar software – so essentially instead of playing all the guitar, it was programmed into a sampler to get a real tight, almost machine-like feel.
Then the raw audio of that was literally played, via my phone, through my Orange amplifier and miced up like any normal guitar. Make the drums a bit clumsy and jittery, and suddenly you’ve got some weird kind of powerpop Beatles metal, by way of Gary Numan!
As for the lyrics, I’d been reading a few pop-psych, philosophy-lite books and it bled over into the tunes I was writing at the time (see later: ‘Graves for Sophistry).
When I went to record the vocals I’d forgotten pretty much what any of it meant, to be honest. But those are the best songs – written in a flash, then months later, not even the person who wrote it knows what the hell is going on.
This one was also written in 2025. But has real-life guitars! Immanuel Can’t was a successful experiment that was a real carpal-tunnel pain in the wrists to create and I’m not sure I want to repeat too often.
According to my notes at the time: “This one began life as a little idea I recorded on my phone in September 2024, except then the lyrics were the nonsensical ‘castles in my haaaaaaands’. No idea what that meant so I rewrote them about everyone’s least favourite South African Nazi.”
This is a remix of a tune I put out at the end of last year. Like ‘Immanuel Can’t’, the demo used a programmed guitar, but it was recorded via real human hands for this release.
But not being James Hetfield, I couldn’t get the timing right with all the switching between palm-muting and normal rhythm guitar, so literally glued together numerous takes – might as well as used a robot!
Anyway, this is the second (and final!) song about that useless prime minister on this album (don’t worry, other world leaders get a skewering soon enough).
‘Fun’ fact: This is the only song on the album which uses what us musician nerds call an ‘amp sim’ for the guitar. As in, the whole ‘amp’ and ‘speaker’ part of the guitar chain is in the computer! The wonders of technology. That’s why it sounds better/worse than the other songs, depending on your tastes.
I didn’t mean to have two songs about getting into space on the same album. But it is what it is. I had other songs that had to be cut because they weren’t quite working, but these two made it over the line… Into space?
This one’s a fun one though – constantly changing tempos, sounds like drunken Weezer. Simply had to make the cut (into space? No, that doesn’t work).
The album version uses the demo’s original guitar recording – you might be able to tell when things get horribly out of time at the end due to some time-stretching mistake that got baked in somewhere in the mixing down process, but I decided it kind of fit the disoriented feeling of the song’s sudden comedown (into space? Nope, that doesn’t work either).
And like the other space song, it too was written in 2025 based on an idea from September 2024! Inspiration comes in waves. From space!
As mentioned earlier, here’s another philosophy-adjacent song (also written in 2025! What the hell?!)
According to my notes at the time: “I came across an article on BBC News about using modern tech to read a 2000-year-old burnt Roman scroll, and – of course – it was a work of philosophy. It’s as if the ancient Greeks and Romans ever wrote anything else… It was always going to be a work of philosophy, wasn’t it?”
I wondered what if these weren’t works of deliberate philosophy, but just diaries of the everyday Roman? And a lyric had to be written.
Like ‘Better Vampires’ it too was based on a demo recording I did in 2024 and kind of forgot about until finding it again in 2025.
7. Better Suggestions (Why Won’t You Just Die?)
I had a fucking ball writing and recording the demo of this tune in February 2026. “Party hard like Andrew” particularly cracked me up – I figured a lot of people would assume I was talking about the prince (he was in the news a lot at the time) when really I was tipping my hat to the king of partying himself, Andrew WK.
I will leave it up to you to decide who the song is targeted at. It’s a bit vague. Mmhmm. One day, hopefully soon. I kind of hoped it would have happened by now. Maybe it will between me writing this (September 2026) and the album’s release. (Editor’s note: It did not happen.)
As for the recording, it uses most of the demo’s original guitar as it was just so damn crunchy. No idea where I’d put the mics that day, but it was godly, obviously. This is the problem with home studios! Cats, children and drunk-ass adults also live in them, knocking things around.
This one started life in early 2024, but wasn’t finished completed until 2025. Almost dumped it until I came up with that killer Moog riff. You’ll know it when you hear it.
Not sure what else to say really – it’s a side two track. Yeah. Bit epic, bit Pumpkinsy. I had better songs that didn’t quite gel, but I guess this one’s not embarrassing.
Finally, a song that wasn’t written in 2025/6! Kind of. The lyrics and the melodies were, but the backing chords/idea dated back to a shitty political punk thing I wrote as far back as 2002/3. I knew the chords were good, but it wasn’t until just recently I found a way to make it work.
I think the guitar solo in this song is the first one on the album? Nearly half an hour in before you get to hear how (not) well I can really play. I was trying to get it down while my daughter was watching some YouTube slop loud on the TV. She probably thought I was having a psychic freakout, playing guitar one string at a time!
Like some other music nerds, I like using spreadsheets to keep track of everything I have to work with and have folders of recordings going back as far as the last millennium…
This song came together in early 2026, based on a little acoustic guitar recording from 2015 I’d labelled “catchy ditty demo, melody, indie, pop, chords”. Doesn’t sound inspiring, but it’s better than the decade-long wait for it to make it into a song suggests.
I was really happy with the song when I demoed it, but not sure the final version really reached its potential. But hey, it’s OK. Probably my best Weezer ripoff in a while.
Another ‘fun’ fact: part of it uses the same chord progression as the chorus from ‘Better Suggestions’. Total accident. I was writing a lot of material, and somehow that chord progression slipped into two completely different songs. Whoops. I probably do it all the time, but this time I noticed…
11. Indestructible, Ultra-Glued
When I got ‘into the zone’ early in 2026, decided to start with a little punk banger – but was lost what to write about. Looking around the room, I saw a tube of some kind of beauty product (not mine, look at me, come on!) that had the words ‘indestructible’ and ‘ultra-glued’ on it, and half an hour later I had a song mentioning JD Vance’s alleged predilection for couches.
Umm, sometimes these things just happen.