Angels & Airwaves - Chasing Shadows [Indie Exclusive]

Chasing Shadows is the strangest and most ambitious side project in the Angels & Airwaves catalog. Released in 2016, the four song EP was built as a companion piece to Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows, the novel Tom DeLonge co-wrote with A.J. Hartley. Music as soundtrack to a book nobody had read yet was a very Tom DeLonge idea, and the songs are better than that premise suggests.

Recorded at Jupiter Sound with Ilan Rubin on drums and Aaron Rubin producing alongside DeLonge, the EP leans hard into the widescreen side of the band. "Overload" opens with the chiming, delay soaked guitar figures that have been AVA's signature since We Don't Need to Whisper, while "Voyager" and the title track stretch out into the slow building, synth heavy atmospherics the band does better than almost anyone in the post-emo world. "Artillery" is the fast one, and it hits harder for the company it keeps.

It is a short record with a big sound, and it marks the point where DeLonge's extramusical obsessions and his songwriting finally started pulling in the same direction rather than against each other. For fans who came in through blink-182 and stayed for the reverb, this is a key piece of the puzzle.

This indie retail exclusive pressing puts the EP on canary yellow opaque vinyl, cut at 45 RPM for extra headroom and mastered at GZ Media. A limited color run of a release that spent years hard to find on wax.