By the time In Mind rolled around in 2017, Real Estate had every excuse to sound like a band on shaky ground. Founding member Matt Mondanile was out, a new guitarist (Julian Lynch) was in, and everyone was scattered across different zip codes. But here’s the twist: the album plays like a band reclining on a sun-bleached porch somewhere in Big Sur, not wrestling with an identity crisis.
“It’s weird, right?” bassist Alex Bleeker said when I mentioned how settled the record sounds. “We’ve had lineup changes before, but for some reason people really locked onto this one. But Julian’s been around since the beginning—we went on our first tour with him.”
If Atlas was the sonic blueprint of Real Estate’s signature breezy melancholy, In Mind was them stretching out the corners. Bleeker said the band’s goal wasn’t to ditch the formula but to expand it. “There was always this impulse to explore new territory,” he explained, “to use sound as an exploratory instrument.”
Nowhere is that exploration more obvious than on “Two Arrows,” the album’s six-minute, slow-unfurling jam that goes full cosmic by the end. “That came out of these long days where we’d get together, work on arrangements, and just mess around jamming,” Bleeker said. “That outro was just something we kept looping because it felt good—and we thought, ‘Let’s keep that on the record.’ It kind of becomes the centerpiece.”
Julian Lynch’s presence is quietly seismic. The guy doesn’t grandstand—he paints in tones. Bleeker credits him with broadening the band’s sonic vocabulary: “He brings a whole new palette. It’s exciting and familiar all at once.”
And then there’s California. After years of sounding like they belonged on a Santa Monica boardwalk despite being from Jersey, Real Estate finally relocated west—and suddenly the music makes even more sense. Bleeker, now a full-blown surf junkie, said it wasn’t intentional, just inevitable. “We weren’t trying to conjure that kind of imagery consciously,” he said, “but at this point? It’s probably just subconsciously baked in.”
He’d only been surfing for a couple years at the time of our chat, but the stoke was real. “I’m totally hooked,” he confessed. “We’re on tour right now, I’m sitting in a van talking to you, and all I’m thinking about is surfing. Like, I’m 30 now, and that’s how I relax.”
Fair warning: listening to In Mind might give you the same itch. Even if you’re nowhere near the ocean, Real Estate makes you feel like maybe—just maybe—you already are.
Listen to the interview above and check out the video to "Darling" below.
