Some artists take years between records. Igor Keller, the Seattle-based composer and multi-instrumentalist behind Longboat, recorded eight of them last year alone. His 34th album, Absentia, is out now, and it arrives with the emotional weight of someone who has been sitting with its subject matter long before the sessions began.
The record is a 13-track exploration of loss in all its forms. But where most albums about grief reach for the universal, Longboat moves sideways — into the political, the comic, the quietly brutal. “Once It’s Gone” examines a woman whose identity was built on beauty now fading, though Longboat is careful not to moralize. As Igor Keller explained in a recent interview, beauty and morality are separate things entirely, and the song intentionally leaves judgment to the listener. “Hope Dies Hard,” meanwhile, is the track that cuts closest to home. “You can cover a great distance with a little hope,” Keller said. “But once that’s permanently gone, for whatever reason, things change.”
Musically, Absentia marks a deliberate turn towards warmth. Igor Keller built the album around live instrumentation performed by a band of returning collaborators: drummer James Squires, bassist Will Moore, pianist Eric Verlinde, and guitarist Ryan Leyva. The decision wasn’t purely aesthetic. As Keller put it, the songs simply needed real hands playing them. Sound engineer Floyd Reitsma, who worked across four of last year’s eight albums, handled recording and mixing with what Keller described as a stellar command of the material.
Absentia sits within a thematic trilogy recorded back-to-back in May 2025, alongside Prepare Yourself, which is about mortality, and Revenge Ballads. Keller wrote and produced all three simultaneously, each distinguished by subject, instrumentation, and emotional register.
Absentia is out now.