Brian Eno ForeverAndEverNoMore Review: Facing the Twilight of Life…and Humanity

For Eno, late adulthood doesn’t just bring forth new perspectives on humanity or the universe at large, but on one’s own existence as well.

Brian Eno, ForeverAndEverMore
Photo: Cecily Eno

Brian Eno’s 29th solo studio album, ForeverAndEverNoMore, opens with the ambient music pioneer in a contemplative state. “Who gives a thought about the nematodes?” the musician and producer ponders mournfully. After pausing for a few seconds, he then proceeds to answer his own rhetorical question with a general observation on the hustle and bustle of everyday existence: “There isn’t time these days for microscopic worms/Or for unstudied germs of no commercial worth.” In short, nobody.

Later in that brooding opening track, “Who Gives a Thought,” Eno equates humanity’s collective indifference toward the working class with our already-established apathy toward animal phyla. The question is slightly altered on the song’s third verse—“Who gives a thought about the laborers?/The ones who dig and toil/Who weld and reap and sow”—yet it still results in the same type of uncaring response. Eno even coos out the song’s wistful final line about school teachers’ undervalued work as if societal negligence was a foregone conclusion.

Inspired by what Eno calls our “current climate emergency,” the album envisions, as the finality of its namesake suggests, a decaying world with a rapidly approaching end date. While ForeverAndEverNoMore trades in the delicately textured and intimate soundscapes of past Eno releases like 2016’s Reflection—as on the eight-minute-long “Making Gardens Out of Silence,” where Japanese performance artist Kyoko Inatome’s heavily processed vocals float across an ethereal expanse—it also doesn’t hold back any harsh truths about where our planet is going.

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Eno conjures images of apocalyptic terror on the unassuming “There Were Bells,” which starts with a series of soft synth-heavy tones before plunging into complete darkness. “There were horns as loud as war that tore apart the sky/There were storms and floods of blood of human life,” he cries out over the increasingly bass-heavy mix, with his fatalistic proclamation, however dramatic, already closely mirroring reality. An ominous atmosphere hangs over “Garden of Stars,” where Eno’s voice takes on an almost demonic intonation: “These billion years will end.”

While ForeverAndEverNoMore’s intentions are certainly noble, and its overall assessment of the state of things is, sadly, on point, the album is hampered by Eno’s overly didactic messaging. His pensively exhortative lyrics work fine within their specific contexts, where the songs themselves lean into the existential terror that their pessimistic worldviews provide. But on more delicate offerings, like “Icarus or Blériot” and “Sherry,” the songwriting feels counterintuitive to Eno’s elegant musicianship, becoming an obtrusive supplementary element.

The strongest emotional responses the album is likely to elicit come from songs where the 74-year-old musician gets emotionally candid about his mortality—the moments where the personal eclipses the political. Eno is particularly self-conscious about his aging body on “I’m Hardly Me,” noting with a plainspoken resolve how everything these days feels “new” and that “it’s not the same,” until he accepts, by the track’s cosmic end, that “nothing can ever be the same.” For Eno, late adulthood doesn’t just bring forth new perspectives on humanity or the universe at large, but on one’s own existence as well.

Score: 
 Label: Verve UMC  Release Date: October 14, 2022  Buy: Amazon

Paul Attard

Paul Attard is a New York-based lifeform who enjoys writing about experimental cinema, rap/pop music, games, and anything else that tickles their fancy. Their writing has also appeared in MUBI Notebook.

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