Milwaukee’s Josh Evert has spent the better part of a decade collecting the pieces that would eventually become Photogenic Memory, his forthcoming full-length arriving this fall. To tide us over until then, he’s just dropped the album’s first single, “Sound of Machines,” a track that lives up to its title in the most rewarding way possible: it hums, glitches, and glows.

If Evert’s name doesn’t ring an immediate bell, his fingerprints likely do. He’s the former frontman of Milwaukee mainstays The Fatty Acids, one half of Dinner Set Gang with Derek DeVinney, and the co-owner of Silver City Studios, the artist-run space that has quietly hosted everyone from Caroline Polachek and Danny L Harle to SistaStrings. In other words, he’s the kind of guy who has been building the room while everyone else was busy trying to get in it.

“Sound of Machines” is the first taste of a record that Evert wrote in fragments across residencies at Homestead National Monument and ACRE, during backpacking stretches through Latin America, in the isolation of the pandemic, and through recent moments of personal loss. That’s a lot of emotional weather for one song to carry, and yet the single moves with a light, curious touch — glitch-driven rhythms bumping up against post-rock intricacy, all wrapped in the kind of pop instinct that makes the whole thing feel less like homework and more like a very good daydream.

Rock & Roll Globe recently pegged Evert as an artist who “brings a widescreen pop approach to his experimental ambitions, owing a debt to The Flaming Lips and Fountains of Wayne in equal measure,” and that framing tracks. There’s a real tension on “Sound of Machines” between fragmentation and cohesion, between the meticulous studio hand of a working engineer and the looser, more human impulse to just write a good song about how memory keeps rearranging the furniture.

That, ultimately, is what Photogenic Memory is about: the way we revise, aestheticize, and occasionally beautifully mis-remember our own histories. Evert’s evolution as a mix engineer becomes part of the concept itself, subtly “correcting” and reframing older material in a way that mirrors the album’s central meditation on perception. The record features contributions from Mol Sullivan, Emma Witmer, Barry Paul Clark, Rob Weiss, D’Amato (Beauty Steps), Ryan Thomas Reeve, Will Hansen, Sean Behling, and Andy Kosanke — a collaborative ecosystem that reflects Evert’s deep roots in the Milwaukee scene.

Photogenic Memory is available to preorder now, and “Sound of Machines” is streaming everywhere. Stream it on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/search/Josh%20Evert%20Sound%20of%20Machines

Consider this your official invitation to spend the rest of the summer getting acquainted before the full record lands this fall.