The songs on Magical Powers’ debut, Stepping Outside, exist within dreams, among friends, and amidst daily frustrations. Though the album reads as exceedingly personal, enough distance is granted for its sentiments to feel universal. It seeks the beauty in the proverbial in-between: missed calls, walks & drives, faces bathed in the glow of a stoplight, and being “lost in circular thought”. It’s fitting, then, that the music on the record is littered with blink-and-you’ll-miss-them details that linger on after the songs end: buried strings and keyboards; wispy rhythm guitar lines; Emma Bieniewicz’s ethereal backing vocals.

A simple elevator pitch for Stepping Outside could read something like “Land of Talk’s subtle dream-rock meets The Spirit of the Beehive’s mutant psychedelia”, though such comparisons would still seem slight. The bedrock of their sound is dual-guitar interplay that manages to feel both atmospheric and grounded at once, with a disciplined rhythm section that functions like post-punk. Remnants of shoegaze, emo, slowcore, and even straight-ahead pop music float freely in the album’s ether. The tight, direct riff that drives “Find Yourself” suggests There’s Nothing Wrong with Love-era Built to Spill, but the sticky chorus would almost feel at home in one of The 1975’s less operatic songs. Meanwhile, the guitars on “I Feel the Light” create the airy feeling that one looks to the Cocteau Twins for, though its trudging drum loop and slow pace shroud the song in an otherwise gray light.

These juxtapositions coalesce into a record that feels caught between worlds; perhaps, a snapshot of a life in transition. That sense can be summed up through the sequencing of the last two tracks: “Gary’s Brain” is a garage punk banger that looks at life’s mundanity & responds with a sardonic “it’s always something”, but closer “Stepping Outside” (featuring Bieniewicz taking lead vocal duties, backed only by electric piano) is in a far more downbeat register, with the quietly devastating couplet “tried to grab your hand but I missed / thought about it more, and then I thought about it more” delivered before a funereal viola line closes out the record. While it may seem surprising to hear such different songs one after the other, it feels like the only way to close an album so dense with varied sounds and emotions. Stepping Outside seeks to remind us that even though we may feel like our lives amount to little more than apathy or dreams of death, nothing can take away the fact that we may have once had a place to feel safe and beautiful. And maybe we still do. As suggested at the end of “Little Things”, you can always take yourself back to the best day of your life – if you want to.

-Samuel Whaley