Your Grandparents are fascinated with time. It can neither be created nor killed; there’s never enough of it, but it can stretch on forever. Time is a form of currency that can be saved, spent, and gambled away. It can be wasted. Wounds heal, the flocks march from field to fold, and, in the end, it makes fools of us all. “I think time is a circle, infinitely repeating itself,” says producer Cole Thompson. “And there’s a bunch of smaller circles within the larger one. Everything we experience is cyclical in the micro and macro.” 

On their drink sum wtr debut, The Dial, the Los Angeles trio — producer Cole Thompson and vocalists DaCosta and Jean Carter — deeply consider these disparate ideas. The record works as a meditation on time, but posits that in order to truly grasp the concept and all of its ambient qualities, one must remain rooted in the present. The group, who met in middle school in Culver City and are now in their mid-late 20s, has been making music for a decade, patiently watching the pieces of their career fall into place. They seemed to snatch their genre-agnostic but hip-hop-rooted songs from the cosmos, seizing on a moment of inspiration — a loop here, a turn of phrase there — and proceeding in a stream of consciousness. “We’d link up in the studio, and whatever anyone experienced in a week is what ended up on the track,” says Thompson.

The Dial took shape more slowly, the result of what DaCosta calls “focused intentionality.” “There was a shift in our mindset,” he explains, “We wanted to be more comfortable going back to the drawing board and refining.” All told, the album took shape over the course of more than two years. After some initial sessions in Joshua Tree, Your Grandparents chipped away at The Dial, careful not to rush any one element into place. The result is stunning: a kaleidoscopic trip through heartaches and joys, moments of frustration and hope. Cole Thompson’s production reaches through time, gathering up influences from divergent eras and meshing them into a singular whole. There’s the house-meets-G-funk slink of “Be Cool,” the smooth Dilla-time boogie of “Down,” and the ESG-informed dance-punk of “BAD NEWS.” DaCosta and Jean Carter are deft performers, effortlessly switching from elastic band rap flows to golden-hued melodies. 

Album opener, “The Dial,” establishes the theme. By the time the trio sat down to complete the song, they’d landed on their time motif but needed a way to fully express it. “We wanted to relay that message that things will work out when they’re supposed to,” says DaCosta. “The best way to get the most out of hard situations is to keep your head down and work with integrity.” Jean Carter and DaCosta float over Thompson and Josh Conway’s breezy funk instrumental, singing, “Now when my sun sets, and I look at the dial/ I wanna surely say I wasted no time.” It’s a warm, inviting tune, one that came together over the course of only a couple days and, as Thompson says, “sounds exactly like how it felt to make it.” 

Over the dreamy '90s pop sonics of “Ali & Jen,” the vocalists ruminate on life’s harder lessons, understanding that with time comes wisdom, recognizing the necessity of more painful moments. “Conversations,” a late album highlight, is an exercise in vulnerability. “It’s very therapy-inspired,” Jean Carter reveals. “I was trying to take more of an initiative toward bettering my mental health. It was another pocket of purpose we could tap into: People are feeling these things, but not nearly enough people are getting help. We wanted to normalize those emotions and offer something people can jam when they feeling that type of way.”

Your Grandparents’ songs are big-hearted and welcoming, filled with the wide-eyed wonder of youth and the sobering wisdom of aging. They’re writing about the ethereality of it all, the moments that contour your existence, the things you’ll look back on when doing that final assessment. The Dial is a beautiful, empathetic piece of work that understands the contexts from which it came and builds upon them, walking that fine line between contemporary and timeless.