A.S. Fanning’s Psychedelic Odyssey Through Consciousness and Reality ‘Today Is For Forgetting’

A.S. Fanning’s Psychedelic Odyssey Through Consciousness and Reality

‘Today Is For Forgetting’ out November 14th

Take Me Back To Nowhere out February 2026

via K&F Records

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Photo Credit: Neil Hoare

“States of anxiety set to music”

ROLLING STONE

“The sound of an artist pushing himself to the brink”

CLASH

“Mushroom Cloud is a superb effort from a songwriter following his muse to unfamiliar territory and reaping the rewards. It’s a 21st-century Franz Kafka turns indie album; if only he was a little bit funnier and had a soothing baritone.”

FAR OUT MAGAZINE

Irish songwriter A.S. Fanning releases ‘Today Is For Forgetting’ on November 14th, the second single from his forthcoming fourth studio album Take Me Back To Nowhere (February 6th, K&F Records), with a video following shortly after.

Where the first single ‘Romance’ explored emotional desolation through stark landscapes, ‘Today Is For Forgetting’ ventures into stranger territory—a psychedelic meditation on consciousness, time, and the spaces between realities. Propelled by bouncy synths and Fanning’s resonant baritone, the track creates a disorienting atmosphere that mirrors its subject matter: the experience of existing outside linear time.

“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.

Central to the song is what Fanning calls “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.”

This fragmented perception of time isn’t purely abstract for Fanning. He 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 Fanning, this raises questions about whether time is something we discover or something we construct. “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.”

The accompanying music video, directed by Fanning’s visual collaborator Neil Hoare, translates the song’s disorienting themes into stark visual form. Drawing from J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’—a key influence Fanning identified early in the process—the video centres on brutalist architecture captured through drifting drone footage and spiralling camera movements. Spectral figures reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe and Lee Harvey Oswald haunt the frames as ghosts of beauty and violence moving through ruin. Hoare describes the result as “a Ballardian fever dream, a montage from hell where memory outlives truth,” created by “favouring Fanning’s interpretation over any research of my own, trusting unreliable memories more than accountants’ truths.”

This latest offering deepens the album’s exploration of disorder and the collapse of shared reality, offering another insight into Take Me Back To Nowhere which emerged from a period of creative disruption. After breaking his wrist early in the writing process, Fanning found his usual songwriting methods fundamentally altered. Unable to absent-mindedly play guitar—a crucial tool for engaging his instincts—he turned to furious early-morning sessions of stream-of-consciousness writing, producing pages of fragmented lyrics that initially filled him with anxiety and paralysis. “The tyranny of endless words, floating in chaos and disorder,” as he describes it.

During this time, Fanning immersed himself in science fiction literature, particularly the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and J.G. Ballard. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven—about a man whose dreams alter reality—opened up a genre he’d previously avoided, and he found deep resonance with its premise that “reality is just a foundation to build on.” Ballard’s exploration of psychological landscapes and his loss of faith in presented reality particularly influenced the album’s themes.

“I think a combination of all these things led me to some of the themes of this album,” Fanning explains. “Accepting that there is no objective reality, and that each of us are profoundly isolated from one another, unable to reach any common ground or understanding. Struggling to rectify our individual experience of the world into any unifying concept, or agreed shared reality. Embracing disorder seemed to be the healthiest way to deal with this.”

The album’s working title was Greetings from the Depths of Confusion. Rather than following a clear narrative, Fanning aimed to create something intentionally disorienting while maintaining a cohesive world and atmosphere both lyrically and musically. The title Take Me Back To Nowhere expresses a desire to escape completely—“to return to a world beyond reason, of unexistence.”

Drawing from Irish literary tradition and folk music while incorporating elements of 60s psychedelia and rock ‘n’ roll, Fanning has carved out a unique space in the European indie landscape. Since relocating to Berlin following the dissolution of his previous band The Last Tycoons, he has released three critically acclaimed solo albums: Second Life (2017), You Should Go Mad (2020), and Mushroom Cloud (2023), which earned him Songwriter of the Year honors from Far Out Magazine.

Fanning has toured extensively throughout Europe and beyond, showcasing at SXSW, and performing at renowned festivals including Ireland Music Week, Endless Daze (South Africa), Left of the Dial (Netherlands), Live At Heart (Sweden), and Orange Blossom Special (Germany). In June 2024, he was invited to perform on German national television’s legendary Rockpalast programme, cementing his reputation as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary indie-folk.

‘Today Is For Forgetting’ arrives November 14th on all platforms, with a video coming shortly after. Take Me Back To Nowhere follows February 6th 2026 via K&F Records.

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TAKE ME BACK TO NOWHERE