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Photo by Andrew Boyle

Every artist has had to decide what happens once the tour finally stops. For Vacations, that decision came about after a relentless run behind 2024’s No Place Like Home, sets at Kilby Block Party, London Calling, a self-curated MATES festival in Los Angeles, and late-night TV spots on Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Late Show. It was what many might call a career high. It also left Newcastle’s favorite indie stars looking inward. The band’s leader, Campbell Burns, has said the group reached a point where they had to step back and take stock, and Pursuit of Anything, out October 2nd via Nettwerk, is the result of that pause.

Like anyone reading this understands, the world still spins while you’re resting. Burns drifted between L.A. and Brooklyn before settling in New York. Bassist Jake Johnson and drummer Joseph Van Lier both got married, with Van Lier welcoming his first child. Guitarist Nate Delizzotti moved to Melbourne. This album took shape amid the band's scattering, from sessions in L.A. to Burns writing all alone in his New York apartment; the band reconvened at Golden Retriever Studio in Sydney, and then Burns wrapped things up at Thump Studios with a rotating cast of session players.

Where their last record No Place Like Home felt like it pulled from the ornate chamber-pop of Weyes Blood and the comfortably numbing warmth of Beach Fossils, Pursuit of Anything takes those same reference points and pushes them somewhere more textured, patient, and seemingly mature. That push essentially represents the album’s core themes. Growing older doesn’t necessarily have to mean growing apart. If anything, the album serves as definitive proof of the very opposite: distance and divergence can actually tighten a bond and not fray it, if the people involved show up for each other.

That closeness can be heard on every track; Burns mentions that “Holy Grail” was born out of a call with the band’s manager, which left him with a sinking feeling that sometimes, a career built on joy and adoration for the art suddenly feels like a trap he'd fallen into. I’m sure that this is something anyone reading can think of their own version of: when something you love isn’t something you love anymore but rather something you’re stuck with, I know I can. The song sits with that contradiction: the thing that fulfills you can also wreck you in the very next second.

Underneath all of it sits Burns’ account of the record’s real subject: the particular vertigo of moving into your 30s while still carrying with you pieces of who you used to be. Pursuit of Anything doesn’t resolve that tension so much as learn to live inside it, which, for a band that’s nearly a decade into its career, might be the most mature move available. Burns has called this their most intentional record yet, made without the usual industry pressure breathing down their neck, and it truly shows. This is a band that sounds settled, not slowed down.

Listen to Pursuit of Anything below: