Photo by Melissa Gore
There is a specific moment right in the middle of 25 Years–a track nestled inside Paper Pools’ debut album, Everything–where the song entirely shifts its weight. A deep, hypnotic bass break cuts through the atmosphere, taking over the track and carrying it all the way to the finish line. It is the kind of heavy, driving rhythm you physically feel in your chest. Listening to it is an completely immersive experience, the acoustic equivalent of standing inside a panoramic movie scene while the credits roll and the room falls away around you.
Behind Paper Pools is Los Angeles-based artist, producer, and designer Allen Orr, a creator who has recently learned to view uncertainty as a profound creative gift. Since his last release, Orr’s life has completely shifted on its axis with the arrival of his twins, Poppy and Roan. The intense, beautiful chaos of welcoming two newborns forced a massive recalibration of his priorities, sparking a deep season of existential self-searching. Instead of being overwhelmed by the turbulence, Orr channeled that emotional contrast straight into his music.
To capture the vulnerability and friction of this chapter, Orr completely transformed his approach to production. Following a transformative artist residency in France led by Grammy-winning producer Shawn Everett, Orr adopted a visceral studio philosophy he describes as “running things through things.”
Rather than leaving recorded tracks pristine, Orr took his finished vocal takes, lilting guitar melodies, and drum lines, and fed them back through tape machines, amplifiers, and arcane outboard gear. By refusing to stay loyal to a song’s original shape, he allowed the machinery to warp, decay, and rebuild the audio until entirely unexpected emotions surfaced.
While Shawn Everett stepped in to mix the album’s sprawling title track, Orr independently recorded, produced, and mixed the rest of the LP himself, creating a sonic landscape that is simultaneously sweeter and more abrasive than anything he has ever made. The record stands as a dense personal geography, traveling from the bleary, nostalgic Galway coasts of his Irish childhood on “Grey Skies” to open-hearted tributes like “A Field of Poppy.”
A Beautiful, Tactile Archive
The sonic DNA of Everything pulls heavily from the definitive soundtracks of Orr’s youth—the dense, drippy reverbs of Slowdive, the sharp edge of The Stone Roses, and the buzzing, bleeding-heart electronic textures of Nine Inch Nails. It bridges the gap between a deeply respected musical past and a completely unwritten future, proving that holding onto both joy and sadness at the same time is just part of being alive.
To honor the deeply personal nature of the record, the physical release has been treated with the exact same level of architectural care as the audio itself. Mastered by the legendary Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters, Everything is bypassing the standard, disposable digital rollout with an exclusive, highly collectible physical run with the album limited to just 500 copies worldwide.
Each record is pressed on gorgeous natural vinyl featuring an embedded black swirl, making every single copy visually unique. Every individual jacket is hand-numbered, pressed locally at Vinyl Ceremony in Pasadena, California.
Everything feels like an open door and a stunning reminder that when you stop trying to dictate exactly where the path is supposed to lead, you open yourself up to something far more beautiful than anything you could have engineered.
“I hope people hear that the unexpected isn’t something to brace against,” Orr reflects. “When you stop trying to control where a song–or a life–is going, you end up somewhere more beautiful than anything you’d have planned.”
