Some albums are records of a moment in an artist’s life; others seem like they were necessary to get through that moment in the first place. The third album of Litvar, Being Here, definitely belongs to the latter category. Over 11 songs, frontman Rex Thurstan and his collaborators turn grief, isolation, uncertainty, and self-reckoning into something remarkably intimate without ever letting the record buckle under the weight of its subject matter. Being Here is ostensibly an album about endings, inspired in large part by the death of Thurstan’s father, but its deeper achievement is in how it understands endings as unstable things. They can be devastating, but they can also produce the odd opening through which an altered version of a person eventually emerges. Litvar has relaxed the indie-rock identity they established on their earlier records, bringing acoustic folk, understated jazz, electronic textures, and atmospheric experimentation into the frame. The result is their most expansive and human record to date, a record that sounds less interested in proving what the band can do and more interested in honestly confronting where its members have been. The title itself seems deceptively simple. Being here is learning to remain present when all that is within you is telling you to disappear into memory, regret, or fear.
That emotional journey starts with “It Takes Magic,” which immediately sets up a different sort of Litvar. The songwriting has a looseness that feels almost conversational, while the acoustic bass gives the material a tactile quality lending itself to an album that is rooted in memory and personal history. Over the course of Being Here, Thurstan’s Gibson J-45 becomes more than an instrument; it feels like a companion, a writing-room confidant, and at times, an emotional anchor. The warmth of the guitar assists in preserving the imperfections and intimacy of the songs that can be lost in a highly produced indie-rock arrangement. “Belong” extends that feeling, its narrator situated in a lonely nightscape where the longing for connection is almost physical. The line about trying to feel like he belongs here is simple and emotionally direct enough that the song works on a level beyond its specific circumstances. This is the kind of writing that understands grief is not dramatic every minute of every day. It is often just walking down a familiar street and finding the world feels somehow unfamiliar. Then “Real Life” opens out, wrestling with the impulse to measure existence against a fantasy version of how things should have played out. Litvar does not allow for easy answers but instead leaves the ambiguity of the story intact. And that’s the key to the honesty of this album: healing isn’t presented as a straight line, but rather as a process of learning to live an unpredictable life again.
If “Belong” is about disorientation, “What Kind of Man” is about finally turning around and facing the person in the mirror. One of the more readily accessible songs on the album, it has a hook-filled melodic sensibility that recalls classic pop songwriting, without losing the darker psychological material underneath. And the contrast is important. Litvar might have dealt with an identity crisis gravely, but they instead provide it momentum. The song feels like a waking up happening in real time. Thurstan’s question isn’t simply about masculinity or personal failure. It’s about responsibility, wasted time, and the chilling realization that no one else is going to take charge of your life for you. There’s something almost exhilarating about the way the song turns self-confrontation into forward motion. “Yeah, I Know” comes back from the other side. Where “What Kind of Man” is about taking control back, this song is about the terror of losing it. The arrangement allows that psychological instability to breathe, offering a broader sonic sweep while maintaining the emotional intimacy of the album. The two tracks taken together are one of Being Here’s most effective couplings: one says, Take the wheel; the other admits that sometimes your hands are shaking too badly to steer. The tension is what gives the album its pulse.
“Stay The Same” and “Waiting For Something” continue the record’s journey through transition but show how well Litvar can walk the fine line between melancholy and musical lift. The latter in particular has a kind of spaciousness that goes beyond the stripped-back folk foundation and into something more cinematic. There are hints of Wilco’s willingness to allow their Americana to be experimental, while the album’s atmospheric electronics sometimes call to mind the more expansive side of Brian Eno or the electronic music of today. Yet Litvar never seems to be borrowing costumes from those influences. The textures still play second fiddle to the story. Maybe that’s the defining strength of Being Here: experimentation is used to illuminate emotion, not to distract from it. “Yeah I Know” can expand, “Waiting For Something” can reach out, and “It Takes Magic” can be almost sparse, but the songs share a consistent emotional language. Even as the settings grow larger, there remains the feeling of someone sitting opposite you and saying something they have labored long to put into words. That intimacy makes the record especially effective for quiet listening. It’s an album for late-night drives, for loneliness, for early mornings when the world isn’t loud enough to drown out your thoughts.
Next up is “Backstab,” one of the more striking stylistic departures on the album. The groove is in slow motion, its jazz-inflected movement creating an almost dissociative atmosphere, as if the listener has stepped outside the usual rules of time. It’s an interesting fit in the larger emotional architecture, because dissociation itself is a kind of departure, a temporary retreat from the present when the present becomes too hard to process. Meanwhile, “When You Come Home” is one of the album’s warmest gestures. It’s a song about unconditional love, but not the romantic grandstanding kind. At its emotional core is the grace we offer to those who are struggling, the recognition that sometimes to love someone is to make sure they know there is a safe place to return to. This has special meaning when considering the album as a whole. There’s a lot of inner turmoil in Being Here, but it never suggests that you must recover on your own. Friends, collaborators, and loved ones build an invisible support system around these songs. That idea is borne out in the warmth of the acoustic guitar, the recurring melodic motifs, and the increasingly open arrangements. Even as Thurstan sings of isolation, the album itself is evidence of connection.
Perhaps the album’s emotional gut punch is “I Hate It Here,” which takes a deeply personal memory and makes it into a universal experience of regret. Thurstan’s last words to his father are “Sure, I’ll come by real soon,” and by beginning the track with them, he gives it an almost unbearable simplicity. Hindsight is cruel to anyone who has lost a loved one. You can say something else at the time, but not after the fact; an ordinary statement can become a permanent monument. Litvar need not garnish that feeling. The weight is already in place. ‘Backstab’ might be dissociation, while ‘I Hate It Here’ represents the inevitable collision with reality that follows. But even here the album refuses to be a memorial frozen in sorrow. The songs are always going somewhere. You can really feel that movement in the second half of the record, where grief slowly turns into acceptance, without pretending that acceptance means forgetting. Thurstan’s songwriting excels when he trusts these subtle changes in emotion. There is no big pronouncement that all is suddenly well. Instead, the listener hears a person gradually participating again in his own life.
Which makes “Leaving Seattle” such a fitting conclusion. If the earlier songs are about being caught inside memories, confusion, and emotional paralysis, the closer is about stepping outside of them. It doesn’t erase what was before; it acknowledges it and then it keeps walking. The song has the feel of going back to work, to being creative, to ordinary existence, after having spent too long believing that ordinary existence was not available to you anymore. In that way, you only really get the album title at the end. Being here is about learning to be here, not because the pain is gone, but because life still has a reason to stay in the moment. So the journey from “It Takes Magic” to “Leaving Seattle” is less a story in the traditional sense than it is an emotional progression that moves through grief, anger, anxiety, reflection, love, and ultimately renewed purpose. The folk influence makes the storytelling immediate, and the electronic and experimental touches keep the album from sounding like a period piece. This is significant in that Thurstan himself describes it as the least electronic Litvar has ever been, but its contemporary nature is unmistakable. The record understands that authenticity in modern music doesn’t mean rejecting technology; it means refusing to let technology become a substitute for feeling.
Ultimately, Being Here is a remarkable reinvention because it never feels like a manufactured one. Litvar hasn’t just changed their sound for the sake of change; they’ve allowed a change in life to dictate a change in music. The result is an album that reaches back to Dylan’s folk storytelling, sideways to Wilco’s adventurous roots rock, and outward into electronic soundscapes, all the while remaining unmistakably personal in its core. Rex Thurstan’s voice has the imperfections, questions, and revelations of someone who has lived through a period that changed his understanding of himself, and Joe Lemieux’s collaboration helps give those experiences shape and momentum. Violet Falkowski and John Blues McCarthy provide color and atmosphere without breaking the intimate core of the album. Above all, Being Here recognizes that grief and renewal are not opposites. They can be in the same room together, sometimes in the same song and sometimes in the same breath. This is an album about losing someone, losing your way, questioning who you have become, and finally deciding there is still a life worth inhabiting. The result of that process is a Litvar that sounds more vulnerable, more adventurous, and, paradoxically, more alive. Being here does not guarantee that the road ahead will be easy. It offers something better: the possibility that after it all falls apart, you can still pick up the pieces, step into the light, and begin the next story.
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