When bands spend months slowly piecing together an album with cheap gear, limited time, and apparently an alarming amount of terrible beer, it’s kind of romantic. Not romantic in the polished indie film sense. More romantic in the sense that you can actually hear people chasing a feeling before life pulls them in different directions. That tension sits at the center of Todo se desvanece, the debut LP from Costa Rican shoegaze/jangle-pop outfit Dylan Thomas. It’s a record obsessed with memory, distance, fading places, and the slow erosion of time. But despite that, it never sounds defeated. Instead, the album moves with a restless energy that makes even its most nostalgic moments feel alive and immediate.
The band’s sound pulls from a wide orbit of influences. You can hear the tangled guitar work of Sonic Youth, the dreamy blur of shoegaze, jangly indie pop, post-punk tension, and flashes of noisy experimentation that feel equally indebted to bands like Television and more modern acts floating around the Latin American underground. But what’s impressive is how naturally all of those elements coexist. Todo se desvanece never feels like a playlist of influences stitched together for credibility points. At its best, the album captures the feeling of wandering through a city at night that you know is changing faster than you can process. The guitars shimmer and collide without losing their shape, while the rhythm section constantly pushes the songs forward with nervous momentum. Even when the arrangements drift into haze, there’s still movement underneath everything.
Vocally, Jan Pfeiffer’s delivery fits the material perfectly. He rarely over sings or forces emotion, which gives the lyrics an understated honesty. There’s a weariness to many of these songs, but also warmth that offers the sound of someone trying to hold onto fragments of people and places before they completely disappear. That emotional subtlety helps separate the album from more obvious shoegaze revivalism. What really gives Todo se desvanece its identity, though, is its texture. This record sounds handmade in the best possible way. You can hear the limitations of the recording process with its rough edges, the imperfect layering, the occasional chaos threatening to spill over but those qualities become part of the album’s charm rather than distractions from it. The production never sterilizes the band's energy. If anything, it amplifies it.
There’s also something refreshing about how unpretentious the whole thing feels. For a record pulling from such a broad set of influences including literary references, noisy art rock, dream pop, shoegaze, and even kraut adjacent repetition, Dylan Thomas never lose sight of melody. Underneath all the swirling guitars and atmosphere are genuinely memorable songs. And honestly, that’s what lingers most after repeated listens. Not the references. Not the genre labels. Not the scene credentials. Just the feeling.
