by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood.bsky.social)
For the rest of my life, March 2020 will likely be remembered as the beginning of the pandemic—or more accurately, as the time at which the pandemic began to affect me. My band played a show on a Tuesday, on Wednesday I went in to work at the bar, and then by Thursday, both my bar and the venue we’d just played were closed.
The memory of those disorienting few days is intertwined with a specific album, also released in March 2020: Unmask Whoever, the debut album by New York’s Activity. Icy and dissociative, Unmask Whoever was one of the soundtracks of my early pandemic, one in which I had a front row seat of mass casualties as my wife worked the graveyard shift at an LA-area hospital. Strangely, the album’s connection with this surreal period of death and hibernation made me love it more. It was comforting in a way to hear the music’s shift and swell, loop and cycle, decay and disintegration.
Five years and a second album later, Activity have returned with its third album, A Thousand Years In Another Way, released to a world that doesn’t feel all that different than the one of 2020. The crackle of catastrophe shivers on the air like an approaching thunderstorm. And yet, the album once again feels like a salve, or perhaps a cipher, a way to decode the distinctly dystopian feeling of being alive in 2025.
Speaking with Activity guitarist and singer Travis Johnson from his apartment in Greenpoint, you get the sense this was by design. A Thousand Years In Another Way—produced by Jeff Berner (Psychic TV and Shilpa Ray) and performed by Johnson along with fellow songwriters bassist Bri DiGioia, guitarist Jess Rees (from Russian Baths), and drummer Steven Levine (who has since been replaced by Pains of Being Pure of Heart drummer Brian Alvarez)—is evocative the way all good art is: acutely and ambiguously at the same time.
Post-Trash discussed with Johnson the themes behind the new album, including why he makes music, and a significant period of his life in which he discovered both a musical inspiration and a mental diagnosis that would change his life forever. This conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, reflects the making of an album that holds its darkness close, but hope even closer.
Post-Trash: Congratulations on the release of the new album. To me its sound has several touchpoints—Blond Redhead, Suuns, even some 80s vibes, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode—yet it doesn’t really sound like anything else. I suspect that’s because much of what influences the music you make does so under the surface. Which of your influences is obvious to you when you listen to A Thousand years in Another Way that listeners might not hear in the music?
Travis Johnson: At the risk of sounding pretentious, I guess it would be the ambient, early electric Miles Davis stuff. In a Silent Way is, to me, getting referenced in my mind all the time. I'll even say to my bandmates, "I'm gonna do an 'In a Silent Way' thing," and they'll be like, "I don't hear what you're talking about at all." (laughs) But in my mind, I'm always trying to apply a of where you’re never really sure how something was made. The unnaturalness of a thing—to me, that's huge.
PT: When did you discover In a Silent Way?
TJ: I remember exactly the day I heard it. I think I was 17, and I went over to my friend Max's house to study or whatever, and he just put it on. We were always being like, "Have you heard this? Have you heard this?" He liked a lot of more cerebral stuff that I wasn't into yet. He introduced me to Tortoise and DJ Shadow. I remember he put on In a Silent Way and I was just like, "Oh my God, I didn't know this kind of thing existed." It’s been in my brain for the rest of my life.
PT: Did you have the experience of—the closest metaphor I can think of is when you meet a person at a party, and after five or ten minutes, you're like, "Oh, this fucking person, they get me"? There are certain records that come along where you're like, "This record explains a little bit of what it's like to be me." Would you say In a Silent Way is one of those albums that explains what it's like to be inside Travis's head?
TJ: That's a great way to put it. Yeah, I think so. I think about this a lot because that's really what I want our music—music in general to do—to get at a feeling of what it feels like in your own head that you couldn't really put down in words. No one could ever really explain it, but just to hit on a feeling. In a Silent Way is one of those records that did that. I was like, "Oh, this is what a certain kind of peacefulness sounds like, what being lost in certain kinds of thoughts feels like."
PT: I think that's a good segue to start talking about A Thousand Years in Another Way specifically. It's interesting that you said it's in the back of your mind trying to get after a feeling or an emotion. I had a couple of words that popped out to me on repeat listens. So I thought it would be fun if I give you a word that popped into my mind, and you can say whether you're like, "Oh yeah, I see that," or "Dude, you're crazy." You game?
TJ: (laughs) Yeah, I’m in.
PT: The first thing that popped into my mind—and this is also supported by some of the music videos, especially the music video for “In Another Way” with that Lynchian movie theater vibe—is doubling and mirroring. That concept really kept popping up in my mind when I listened to this record. What do you think about that?
TJ: Dead on. You nailed it. So much of what I'm occupied with has to do with self-deception and what that does to your brain, what it does to your relationships, what it does to the world at large. I think if you scale it up massively, somebody like Donald Trump is an example of a person who lost touch with who he actually is. After years of using whatever it is to distract from whatever's inside that you don't want to look at, It's buried so deep down that it's not recoverable.
The Lynchian stuff—so much of his work is about what happens when you don't face something, and all these characters split into different things. That's huge for me. Self-deception is a big part of what makes the world what it is—all of us walking around constantly trying to avoid parts of ourselves that scare us.
PT: Do you have a specific memory of a moment where you had to confront something in yourself that seemed like self-deception?
TJ: Yeah, well, a lot of them. When I was 18, I developed obsessive compulsive disorder. It had specifically to do with what's called "pure O"—I don't know if you're familiar with these terms, but pure O means being purely obsessive. I don't lock and unlock doors or count stuff like that. Instead there were things that had been hiding in my brain for a long time that all of a sudden just appeared and have been an influence on everything ever since. When I got diagnosed, it was like, "Oh yeah." Looking back, I can remember all these moments in my life where I was really caught up on something, and until now, I was really good at avoiding it. Now it was just like my brain was like, "No, you're not going to be able to avoid this anymore." It was really scary.
PT: Do you find that making music is a way to engage with those potentially obsessive moments in your life, those obsessive thoughts that just won't leave you alone, that actually calms you down or brings you relief?
TJ: Yeah. Even at the time, music was always an escape but also sometimes a comforting way of actually confronting things too. It's like, "Oh, I can confront this scary truth about myself, whatever's going on in my life, but I can do it a lot easier if I have something that is kind of soothing." And sometimes what’s soothing is not soothing music. Sometimes it’s noisy stuff.
Playing music, especially when we’re down at the rehearsal space and playing a locked groove for 20 minutes with very minimal variations, is very therapeutic for me. The first song on the album, "In Another Way,” was like a 19-minute jam of just me doing that loop on the guitar over and over again, kind of figuring it out. But also, once we did figure it out, just playing it forever. Maybe that's the tic that I have. Instead of saying a phrase over and over again out loud, I play the same loop on repeat. So, it's definitely helpful.
PT: Next theme. This one's partly going to reveal my pretentious side, so I apologize in advance. Are you familiar with the author Mark Fisher at all?
TJ: Yeah.
PT: He wrote a book called The Weird and the Eerie which I happened to be reading this week for the first time while listening to your record. Dude, this record is weird and eerie.
TJ: It is for sure! It's definitely weird and eerie, which reflects what the world feels like right now. There's a moment on "Your Dream" where the song kind of starts and then stops and starts back up, and all of a sudden you hear all these room mics just rush into the recording. We were intentionally trying to get at what it feels like when a bad thought enters and then there's nothing else but the bad thought. That is obviously a very weird and eerie feeling.
PT: Last one in this exercise. Again—this may say more about me and my upbringing than any of your intentions—but I definitely had a sense of biblical apocalypse.
TJ: You're just nailing them, knocking them down (laughs). I have a friend from high school who's a pastor, and he was telling me something about his thoughts on the Book of Revelation. He told me, "It's actually a book about the evils of empire. Back then it was Rome. Now it's the US." I’d never heard it put that way so I reread it with that in mind and that's where the last lyric of the album came from.
(Writer’s note: The album’s last song, “A Beast,” ends with the lyric: I saw a beast bloody and wild/down on its knees with the mind of a child.)
Also, I don't know if you've ever read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, but the tone of that book is very biblical. The apocalyptic nature of it is not like the world is literally ending like in (McCarthy’s novel) The Road, but it's scarier than that, actually. The title of the album comes from the idea of a 1000-year respite from evil, which is also in Revelation.
PT: Did you grow up religious?
TJ: Yep, but I didn't read the Bible much at the time or even at all.
PT: Do you hold on to—and here's why I'm going to ask this question—there was a quote sent to me in the press release that says, "Evil is a real thing and having its way, and love is also real. It hasn't lost yet." That to me feels spiritual, specifically from a Judeo-Christian background. Is there anything that you still hold on to from being raised in a religious way or being around that sort of belief structure?
TJ: Yeah, there is. I'm hesitant to give it too many details, for no other reason than I wouldn't want my bandmates to feel like they were being painted with any sort of brush, but yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that has helped through the years, and definitely helped when I was a teenager with my OCD, was the idea of being able to trust that there was something transcendent and good that you didn't have to be afraid to be yourself in front of.
I see so much of the bad stuff in the world as branching off from a billion people all lying to ourselves at the same time. People with massive amounts of power and capital accumulation can really run from who they are for the rest of their lives because they've got so much power. I don't know any way to counter that except to believe that something good is bigger than them. But that's as far as I would go for now.
PT: Do you find yourself thinking more about cosmic level, big picture stuff than the everyday stuff like, I don’t know, doing your laundry?
TJ: I don't know about more than, but it's certainly as much as or around the same amount. Even while I'm doing my laundry, I won’t be able get a thought out of my head. A lot of that has to do with just straight-up actual mental illness. Some of that is like, well, you can't change your brain entirely but there are healthy ways to think about this.
There's a Silver Jews line where (David Berman) says, "You can't change the feelings, but you can change the feelings about the feelings." When I was a kid, those cosmic thoughts were really scary, and now they can wash in and wash out in a much more productive way. It's not like I learned to avoid thinking about them. I just learned to not be crushed by them. And a lot of that's medication too.
PT: Can you remember the best bit of advice that you've ever been given about how to deal with mental illness?
TJ: The thought that immediately came to mind when you asked that question—it's what my mom said when I was 17, and I was just freaking out all the time. I was like, "I want to go back to where I was," which was being a normal kid and having normal thoughts about normal kid stuff, teenage stuff. She also dealt with mental illness and depression for her entire adult life until she passed away a few years ago. But she said, very compassionately, "You are not going back. You're going somewhere new." She said it in a way that was not—I mean, it was scary, but she made it like something to be excited about. "Now you're going somewhere new that you wouldn't have gotten to go if you didn't see this scary stuff first."
That certainly does not make the mental illness go away but it made it so that there was a little bit of something to hold on to when it was getting really bad. Almost like white-knuckling, but in a good way—really holding on to something for dear life that is actually good to hold on to. This idea that this can be actually kind of exciting to have life be bigger and deeper than it was going to be if you had been able to stay in the same narrow, safer confines. That was the biggest one for me.
PT: I'm happy to say that comes through in the music. The sensation you get at the conclusion of the record isn't that everything is fucked and you might as well just go kill yourself or have a drink or whatever. The sensation you get at the end of the record is that somehow, there's something inside of us that—call it hope, I don't know—but it just persists even within the darkness.
TJ: That's awesome to hear, really, because that's how I feel. The last line on the record, to me, is a really hopeful one. It's thinking about something destructive and evil—whether its's the institution of capitalism, or some crazy genocidal state that's ravaging a community, or even just the bad parts of yourself—being brought low. I wouldn't want to make a nihilistic record or a record of giving up.
A Thousand Years in Another Way is out now.