The music of Thin Lear comes into focus like a specter in the dark – beckoning, restless, and yearning – an outstretched hand from the dimness of a room. The moniker of NJ songwriter Matt Longo, Thin Lear has taken on many forms since 2020’s debut, Wooden Cave (featured on PopMatters’ Best Albums of 2020 & NPR), with different collectives of collaborators, producers, and players. And yet, for his second EP in under a year (following last June’s Matthew E. White-produced A Beach of Nightly Glory), Longo preferred to keep things simple: recording over a few months at the home of a trusted friend, playing nearly every instrument, and relentlessly pursuing a singular vision of music designed to shimmer in the evening.

A Shadow Waltzed Itself illustrates the moment one recognizes that something of great value (a person, a community, a sense of self) has quietly moved away from them. Through dark waltzes, and a late-night sonic palette, the EP unfurls stories of those reckoning with this shuddering realization – either fighting against it or simply letting it go. On “Richard’s New Job,” a worker finds himself casually replaced by a machine, and forms a bond with his whirring replacement, potentially at the cost of his own humanity. “Pilgrim” presents a horror story about inherited spite and bitterness, a national, gradual loss of compassion, and a monster brought to life with the mantra, “For every evil that’s been visited upon me, I’ll cast it on you nightly; plague another in return.” EP closer “Beauty of the Shifting Tide,” finds the black sheep of a family letting those he loves leave him behind – to unshackle them from the weight of his depression – viewing himself as “a nail in the sand, some useless demand, a reason to live in the mind.”

Through all of these stories, no matter how lost or unlovable his narrators present themselves, Longo depicts them with rich empathy and complexity, inspired by the tone of Kafka’s short stories. Musically, Longo drew inspiration from the artistic process of insular artists like Phil Elverum, ANHONI, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy. At its heart, A Shadow Waltzed Itself offers a crystalline picture of those left in the distant trail of their own life, watching as it dances away from them, gradually and gracefully out of view.