New ALbum ‘Possession’ leaves us under the spell of Ty Segall

2025: YOLO. With the quickness, time’s still slipping into the future—so fast at times, you may think the end’s in sight up ahead, or that you’ve outrun the long trail of history behind. All that’s absurd, man. Take it from Ty Segall. He’s been on a few trips around the sun himself, making records in orbit as he charts his path forward. Modern life is here to stay, but also (to quote an old civil war scribe), everything rocks and nothing dies—so for Possession, Ty’s 16th album, he strikes up the orchestra in his head with an abiding view of some quintessentially American stories, a quest channeled into ten non-stop bangers. 

Because you gotta move—or something might be catching you! A year and a half removed from the trenchant identity opus of his Three Bells song cycle, Ty’s beamed himself out from deep within psychic interiors. Hitting the trail beneath the big skies of our good ol’ frontier empire, he’s on the hunt for new horizons—and it’s frankly astonishing to hear, at this mature point in his discography, the discovery of invigorated new sonics around every bend. That’s simply what Ty does with his music. Here, compulsive rhythm arrangements are joined in battle by sweeping movements of strings and horns that further the charge righteously.

Possession features some of Ty’s most inspired songs to date. It’s a post–"Paradise City" map of the American way, moving and grooving, but not pointing fingers even as childish fantasies splatter across the windshield. Taking back alleys through complicated cityscapes, ripping riffs jaggedly out of past hits for a new purpose, Ty scans the wreckage scattered all around, singing about the end of the rope while resisting defeat—suggesting an ecstatic new empire to build as he cruises the countryside in his glittering craft