Real Estate

A band for 15 years now, with a half-dozen records to its canny name, Real Estate knows how the press cycle inevitably goes: Someone somewhere at last had a realization about what their songs needed to say and how they should sound, so (at least according to brief biographies like this one) they finally made the best album of their career. But here’s the thing: Real Estate has been so consistently compelling for those 15 years, with their coruscant indie rock shuffles perfectly reflecting the spellbinding glow of suburban ennui, that they know when they have done it. That is, they know when they have written songs that shimmer and fetch and radiate despite or because of the gloom lurking in their grooves. It is the gift and curse of self-
awareness, of sticking together since childhood.

So Real Estate, in turn, needs you to know that Daniel—their sixth full-length album, recorded in an ebullient nine-day spree in RCA Studio A, in Nashville with celebrated producer and songwriter Daniel Tashian—is quite possibly their best album. In 11 compulsively tuneful songs, they connect the uninhibited wonder of their earliest work with the earned perspective of adulthood. What more could you need from Real Estate at 15?

Martin Courtney knew he wanted to write a pop record, a set of instantly accessible songs where the chorus arrived in, say, the first 40 seconds. During the last decade, or essentially since making Atlas, Real Estate did what was only natural for any beloved and freshly aging indie rock institution: They gently pushed back against praise as an effortlessly melodic and quietly radiant band. Colors darkened. Textures curdled. Songs stretched toward the six- and even seven-minute mark. But what if, as Courtney and cofounder Alex Bleeker often say these days, they again just “Let Real Estate be Real Estate,” to shimmer and fetch and radiate without hesitation or second guesses?

Courtney actually learned of Tashian through his daughter, who adored an album he’d produced, Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour. The band reached out and spotted an instant connection despite their distinct wheelhouses—the Grammy-winning Nashville country-pop guy who’d helmed several smashes and the Northeast indie rock quintet with narcotic guitars. Real Estate had never really worked with anyone who wasn’t already a bud. There in Dave Cobb’s famous Nashville lair, Tashian was not shy with his outsider advice about how to boost this song or that one, even playfully throwing the occasional candy bar to emphasize he wanted to hear more. Real Estate had been thinking about R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People and ’90s “soft-rock radio,” the background music of their youth. Tashian helped lead them back toward it, toward an improved edition of the less self-conscious band they’d been at the start.