Irish songwriter A.S. Fanning releases his new single, ‘Today Is For Forgetting’, on November 14th, the second preview from his forthcoming fourth studio album, Take Me Back To Nowhere, out February 6th, 2026 via K&F Records.
Where his first single, ‘Romance’, explored emotional desolation through stark, melancholic landscapes, ‘Today Is For Forgetting’ ventures into more psychedelic terrain. Driven by pulsing synths and Fanning’s resonant, commanding Nick Cave-esque baritone, the track conjures a disorienting new wave atmosphere, mirroring its meditation on consciousness, time, and the liminal spaces between realities.
“This song is about the psychedelic experience, and the feeling of entering some kind of no-man’s-land between this life and the next—or another dimension of existence, not black or white, but grey,” Fanning explains.
At the heart of the song is what Fanning describes as “an explosion of instants”, a vision of time not as a straight line, but as fragments swirling simultaneously around a bewildered observer. “There’s no consecutive sequence in the way time runs. There’s just a central character with various moments and timelines swirling all around him, and it somehow falls upon him to make things make sense,” he adds.
Fanning draws an unexpected parallel to evolutionary biology: “I read a book about octopuses that suggested one of the first things simple organisms developed was a sense of time—before they could see or hear, they had to know whether their surroundings were better or worse than a moment ago.” For him, this raises profound questions about perception: “Our sense of time is like sight or hearing—in one way it lets us perceive something real, in another it’s just something we’ve devised to quantify reality in a way that’s useful to us.”
This latest single continues the album’s exploration of disorder and the collapse of shared reality, a theme born from a period of personal and creative upheaval. After breaking his wrist early in the writing process, Fanning’s usual guitar-based songwriting was disrupted, leading him to experiment with stream-of-consciousness lyric writing, producing pages of fragmented material he initially found overwhelming.
Immersing himself in science fiction literature, including Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven and works by Ballard, Fanning found inspiration in stories that blur the line between perception and reality. “Accepting that there is no objective reality, and that each of us are profoundly isolated from one another…embracing disorder seemed to be the healthiest way to deal with this,” he reflects.
Originally titled Greetings from the Depths of Confusion, the album deliberately resists linear narrative, instead crafting a cohesive, immersive world of disorientation. Its final title, Take Me Back To Nowhere, conveys a desire to escape entirely—“to return to a world beyond reason, of unexistence.”
Drawing from Irish literary tradition and folk music while incorporating elements of 1960s psychedelia and rock ’n’ roll, Fanning has carved a distinctive niche in the European indie scene. Since relocating to Berlin after the dissolution of his band The Last Tycoons, he has released three acclaimed solo albums: Second Life (2017), You Should Go Mad (2020), and Mushroom Cloud (2023), the latter earning him Songwriter of the Year from Far Out Magazine.
Fanning has toured extensively across Europe and beyond, performing at SXSW and festivals such as Ireland Music Week, Endless Daze (South Africa), Left of the Dial (Netherlands), Live At Heart (Sweden), and Orange Blossom Special (Germany) as well as performing live on German national television’s Rockpalast.
‘Today Is For Forgetting’ is out now and the upcoming album Take Me Back To Nowhere is set for release on February 6th, 2026, via K&F Records.
Listen below:
