Has the taste and smell of a particular home cooked meal instantly transported you to a different time and place? Has one bite of an unsuspecting dish, shockingly revived a memory you had no idea you could still feel and touch? The force of nostalgia is unwavering and powerful. One whiff can immediately and immensely immerse you in a memory, a feeling, or a faint image of the past. The processes that occur when neurons fire are unfathomably complex, yet emphatically simple. It’s about the way that a pasta dish from a hole in the wall, mom and pop shop could bring you right back to being a kid with freshly scraped knees and a dirty Yankees shirt with a fresh plate of pasta, cooked by your mother, in front of you. This experience is difficult to articulate, but it's one that we’re all familiar with in some shape or form. It’s one of the many gifts of multi-sensory memories. For me, the most potent way to experience this phenomenon is through well-crafted music. Saturday Night Gym Club’s The Distance is just that. The soundscape that this album inhabits is like a tangible bridge to both nostalgic memories of my childhood and the memories of which I have yet to experience. The latter, being a truly mysterious phenomenon I have yet to derive meaning and or an explanation out of. The Distance in many ways, is a sonic portal, a time capsule, that upon opening it and immersing oneself in it, they are likely to be taken to another realm. As flowery as that sounds, it is an accurate description of the experience. Even the most untrained ear can recognize the amount of hours and effort that was spent, in attempts to tailor this album to each listener’s brain networks in a way that would fire synapses and carry them ‘the distance.’ Regarding an untrained ear, I am just that in this scenario. Electronic/Dance music is not a pocket of music that I am familiar with. Yet, this album works all the same. From the opening track, “U.V. Smile”, the album’s synths scratch a certain part of my brain, embellishing a classic 80s Sci-Fi movie. It gives me a world to live in that I don’t want to leave. Thankfully, this atmospheric energy is built into the very sonic foundation of The Distance. 

Saturday Night Gym Club is a group of musicians hailing from England and Ireland. Their take on Electronic music and off-center pop music radiates a unique energy that is still universal. With The Distance, it is saturated by deep synthwave soundscapes, cathartic vocal melodies, touching song-writing, and all around catchy yet sentimental production. Regarding the genre conventions of Dance music, at the very least, foot tapping is an involuntary reaction even for the least rhythmic soul. The execution of the music leaves quite a motivating impression. It almost feels like being under a spell. Even listening to this album alone in my room several times over, I felt immensely compelled to get up and move. That’s not to say that there isn’t riveting song-writing and a strong narrative woven into the fabric of the album. Songs like “Bare Feet” describe the sensation of letting loose, and allowing oneself to be free, disregarding the consequences. The line, “strolling bare feet,” tells us that this is a song about the pursuit of thrills. Such energy is welcome at the beginning of the album. There are expressions of love and joy prevalent throughout, but the front half of the album is full of blissful vibrations while the back half leaves room for meditative moments of sentimentality. The following track, “Someone Else” describes a similar experience, letting go of one’s past, or their ‘shadow.’ The first thematic shift in the album to me is, “Setback” with a stellar buildup, in which the speaker professes to someone they love, “I’ll follow you.” The crescendo of this track leaves the listener beyond captivated. It’s quite beautiful and goosebump inducing. 

While I enjoy all the songs for different reasons, the next highlight for me is “Condition 1”. Following 6 songs that invite its listener to get up, live in the moment, and be free of their emotional turmoil, “Condition 1” kind of throws them back in the gutter, but in a good way! This song is cinematic, it feels like a film score. It breaks the momentum of the album. It’s a moment of contemplation for both the listener and the speaker. Furthermore, it notes a thematic and sonic change in the record. “Condition 1” is the doorway that separates the two varying thresholds of the album. 

Starting with “Life Improvements”, the latter half of the album has big moments with spotlight vocal performances and uber-satisfying payoffs. “Life Improvements” is a great example of such, it has a wonderful build-up given its 5 minute run time. Similar to ‘Condition 1”, “Dansk” is a cinematic break from the momentum that separates the album from the last two songs (arguably the two most emotionally impactful songs), “Climb Out” and the title track, “The Distance”.  “Climb Out” has perfect placement in the album’s tracklist. It feels very conclusive to the album’s loose narrative. It describes climbing out of the seemingly bottomless pit of grief and anxiety. With great lines like, “The morning sun feels different now, the shadow cast behind me,” the speaker is facing their issues and professing that they are prepared to get better. The hook of the song offers a different perspective, “I only wanted to be forgotten.” It’s a painful sentiment that contrasts the content of the verses. The second verse describes the speaker’s brother who seems to be in the very pit of despair that he’s trying to climb out of. The song is narratively and emotionally complex. It's a song about directly acknowledging one’s pain and attempting to face it. It’s a song of perseverance that is every bit as gripping as it is well-written and engineered. 

The closing track, “The Distance” is ethereal. Lyrically, the song discusses the distance between the speaker and a woman, “she can’t reach across without falling in.” The song is lonely. “The Distance” can be read as a microcosm of the distance that’s not just between the two characters of this song, but the distance between everyone, everywhere. The song remains optimistic though, as the speaker makes an effort to “fill the hole,” essentially building a bridge to reach out and connect with the other person. This is perhaps the true journey that every human being has to take. We come into this world separate from others. Isolated in our solitude. Everything we do in this life is about closing the distance between ourselves and the rest of the world. “The Distance” is the perfect outro to this album. Given my novice nature regarding Electronic Dance music, I never thought that an album like this would make me so emotional and plague my body with goosebumps. Yet, here we are. I’m getting tearful just thinking about it.

The Distance is a sonic triumph for Saturday Night Gym Club. It’s well-engineered, well-textured, well-written, and well-performed. The songs have both catchy production and catchy melodies. It's infectious, through and through. One simply cannot listen to this music without feeling both free, and motivated to get up and dance. What makes this album truly special to me however, is the lyrical content that binds it all together. There is a narrative of healing in this album, which is actually quite fitting for a genre intended to make people dance. Dancing is all about freeing oneself from the stresses of their daily life. It’s all about letting loose and forgetting about their pain for just a little bit. The Distance capitalizes on its genre conventions and uses them to both, tell a great story and make genuinely enjoyable music. For those with wandering souls, I recommend a listen! The Distance is available everywhere.

Author: Jordan

Jordan Wisniewski is a passionate writer and Hip-Hop artist from North Carolina, US.