After – Outbound

We’re back! We’ve got a new look! And we’ve got 11 months of 2025 to catch up on, so please welcome AMNESTY WEEK 2025!!! (spoilers: and a half). Or is that, as this pick by Will Adams suggests, Amnesty Week 2005?

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Will Adams: After have gone all in on their concept, leaving no 2002 stone unturned: WB show soundtrack vibe, cardigans over tank tops, shots that suggest they’re in a contest to recreate the cover of Frou Frou’s Details. It’s a meticulous recreation, but I can’t deny the sound. “Outbound” is their apex. Right down to recreating the bubbly synths that The Matrix breathed into “The Remedy,” After have created a picture-perfect replica of the song I remember hearing in the backseat of my mom’s station wagon, the song whose mid-tempo lilt and shiny production would linger in my ears all day at school, the song that — in 2025 — would release me from cynicism and give into the feeling.
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Claire Davidson: After’s “Outbound” creates such a perfect approximation of sunny, aughts-era pop that I initially thought it had to be a joke, a game of 4-D chess hiding a subversive message under covert layers of irony—after all, who would want to make something so sincere in 2025? As it turns out, though, “Outbound” is content to coast on vibes. And what immaculate vibes they are: the driving acoustic guitar is rich without feeling kitschy, the strings add a nice bit of gravitas to the song’s nonchalant tone, and the lightweight keys are a cooling counterbalance to an otherwise warm track. Lead vocalist Justine Dorsey’s delivery isn’t terribly flashy or bombastic, but her measured approach works for this song as she reassures her partner that she’ll be there to help them in even their most erratic moments. It’s almost uncanny how convincing this song’s throwback approach is, but when the track itself is textually intent on disarming listener anxieties, it’s hard for me to argue with such a delightful result.
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Jel Bugle: Charmingly retro! I think I heard this on an episode of Dawson’s Creek. Great stuff.
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Alfred Soto: As soft as fresh arugula, “Outbound” lets its strummed acoustic chords and late-Clinton-era vocals settle snugly on a willing leaf. 
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Iain Mew: The sense that this is some long-lost acoustic pop radio classic from decades ago borders on uncanny. I found myself thinking of Lene Marlin for the first time in ages and being swept along. What bursts the bubble is when the chorus melody strays a little too close to “Fast Car” and the scaffolding becomes a bit too obvious, wrecking the effect in a way that it wouldn’t for something much less subtle.
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Nortey Dowuona: Photographic Memory, aka producer Max Epstein, is described in his Genius bio as a pop project. This is yet another reason one cannot trust Genius, since two of his most well-regarded songs are gnarled, gritted-teeth grunge and nu-metal songs from frequent collaborators wisp and julie. And after julie’s “starjump,” a morass of imploding drumming and frizzy, reverbed guitar, I listen to this neat little Michelle Branch deep cut and wonder: was he just in the room on the shoulders of Alex Craig so much he got a pity credit? Nothing in either of these shows he contributed anything here. I then heard this, heard a flexibility in his production style, then went back to this song and seized on a possible contribution: the drums. They have a body to them that a Michelle Branch record wouldn’t have — but no, in that song the drumming is more direct and forward in the mix, and sounds better as well. So maybe the drums weren’t his work – maybe the little synth riff in the post-chorus, made to sound close to the synth riffs from 2001 pop-rock? The guitar riff at the beginning of the song that forms its foundation? The nearly imperceptible bass? The outro synth riff? The string arrangements of the outro? Sigh. Whatever he did contribute, it doesn’t make the song itself anything more than a shallow echo of 2005 pop rock.
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Hannah Jocelyn: Homaging the synth from Jason Mraz’s “The Remedy” is crazy work, but that’s also on par with “A Thousand Miles” in the category of “bizarrely well-produced ’00s pop”. After definitely has a gimmick, but they nail that gimmick here about as well as they can. But that comes with caveats; one of my favorite pop songs of the last few years, Lauren Aquilina’s “Empathy,” elevated early-’00s pop with genuinely heartbreaking lyrics; even Pale Waves took John Shanks-core and made it gay. This does nothing with early-’00s pop but recreate it, a Greta Van Fleet for Hilary Duff. But I’m coming clean: “Outbound” captures that sound perfectly.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Charly Bliss for slightly younger zillennials. I was trying, like everyone else here I assume, to figure out which Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen offcut and/or minor Kara DioGuardi credit this reminded me of, and what ebullient chorus would come bursting in. Turns out that a) this chorus wasn’t ebullient or bursting at all; b) the chorus I was actually thinking of was Reneé Rapp’s “Shy” (2025), which is better; and c) I had my referents all wrong. Take away the drum loop, and what “Outbound” actually sounds like is “Breakaway” or Anna Nalick, or even early Taylor Swift: vocal belting gone, thrice-laundered ’90s alt-rock attitude long gone, an unassuming everygirl persona in their place. I realize my personal preferences are clouding me here, but seriously, go back to the 2000s stuff, do some A/B testing, and see which sounds more dynamic.
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Leah Isobel: I like Justine Dorsey’s period-accurate vocal inflections: “I’d knoaugggh you,” “oh-oo-whoaughhh,” “six feet under-graaaahouuund.” And given that all my formative memories are from the early 2000s, I’m not opposed to this kind of spangly jangly sparkle-maker stuff. What makes this slightly unbearable for me is that they simply cannot let the nostalgia be subtext and instead have to make it explicit: “You miss the days when everything was working out for you,” “you know this one by heart.” In this context, the chorus’ exhortation to “just turn around” comes off less as a partner imploring you to be present in the moment and more as a band asking you to let them use your memories to leverage their careers. It’s effective, but it just feels kinda hacky!
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Taylor Alatorre: This is the type of music that made the dormitories in The Sims 2: University feel like cosmically meaningful spaces to the 11-year-old player, even those who took the min-maxing route of WooHooing with each professor to avoid writing a term paper. At that age, you aren’t worried about the narcotizing pull of digital escapism, because who wouldn’t want to escape from the no-man’s-land of being 11 years old? Similarly, I can’t fault After for the thoroughness of their prelapsarian vision, or their urge to method-act their way into a plausible pre-whatever innocence. I believe that they believe in the worth of their influences, whether those be the zeitgeisty radio hits or the soft-focus memories that frame them. Still, though they’re unreservedly sentimental about these things, they aren’t rubes. Contra Pitchfork, there is irony encoded in the DNA of this project, from the band name to the press photos to the simple reality that, unlike its sleazier cousins, none of this music was ever supposed to see an “indie revival.” Maybe I’m being generous because the relapsed Catholic in me prefers pixelated, closed-door intimacy to performative HD decadence. But I also think that a more homebound nostalgia act is itself a kind of generosity, for those of us whose own early adolescent longings never carried us too far beyond the family PC.
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Dave Moore: Impeccable lilt-rock pastiche, but it’s not really Pierre Menard, is it? For one thing, Menard was trying to spontaneously create the classic, not just any old period-appropriate text. (To my knowledge the only ones who have gotten close to pulling off this particular Borgesian gambit in the alt-confessional/adult contemporary space are Pale Waves.) But my number’s my number, and they have it.
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Ian Mathers: I needed to first get over the uncanny simulacrum of sounds from my youth (I guess we all run into those eventually) in order to remember that the particular sounds After is replicating are not ones I particularly enjoyed or hated the first time around. Zero out the uncanny valley replication of those years, and you’re just left with the song. Which is… fine?
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Joshua Lu: Viewed as pure 2000s nostalgia bait, “Outbound” is a straightforward Sheryl Crow ripoff that stands out amidst After’s numerous “Pure Shores” ripoffs. Is that such a bad thing, though? Sheryl Crow isn’t making music like this anymore, and All Saints isn’t making music like “Pure Shores” anymore. Viewed as just a song, “Outbound” is sublime and ethereal, like a warm hug from a dear friend at the end of a hard day. To deny its influences would be ignorant, as would seeing it as only those.
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