“That music is so beautiful…” were the first words my partner whispered as we listened to this album for the first time on a slow Sunday morning. We had each travelled the world long before we met, and we’ve continued to do so ever since. Airports become that liminal space between what you were and what you’re becoming. The metaphor woven through this album resonates deeply with travellers like us: always, inevitably, leaving other wanderers quietly behind as life urges us forward toward an uncertain horizon.
In Airports, the second full-length Orchid Mantis album of 2025, lives entirely inside that quiet. Atlanta-based artist Thomas Howard has spent more than a decade exploring the emotional residues of memory, but here, that exploration feels distilled, focused, and achingly human.
Listening to this record, I felt a combination of warm nostalgia and meditative dissolution. The album wrapped around me like a familiar dream: one I’d nearly forgotten but recognized instantly. There is a pulse of calmness running through these tracks, a kind of sonic breathing that makes the entire experience feel restorative and strangely intimate. The more time I spent inside this world, the more it felt like Howard was documenting the slow-motion blur of recollection of old memories. Additional vocals, drums, and violin contributions throughout the album deepen the timbric and organic foundation beneath the more experimental edges.
In Airports opens with “Generation Loss”, a track that uses the metaphor of data degradation to examine how memory stretches, warps, and thins as life moves forward. The vocals, with the addition of vocalist Lillie Weeks, hover as if broadcast through a distant PA system: processed, washed in effects, softened at the edges. It sounds like a voice remembering itself. The production leans into tape effects (saturation, wow, and flutter) and the gentle instability that comes from it, creating a texture that mirrors the lyrics’ fixation on decay. This is where Orchid Mantis is at his strongest: blending emotional weight with production choices that reinforce the theme rather than decorate it. The guitars float, the bass subtly stabilizes the harmony, and the sonic haze feels beautifully intentional.
“Comedown Phase” shifts into something clearer: bright guitars drenched in reverb, melodic phrasing that bends toward dream pop, and a bassline that gives the song harmonic confidence. The vocals are less obscured this time, revealing the first hints of the more confessional tone that runs through the album. As a producer, I appreciated how the guitars occupy the top end while leaving space for the low-frequency movement of the bass. It creates what I like to call “Orchid Mantis hovering effect”, with lightness on the surface and architecture beneath.
By the time the enigmatic “Something You Said” arrives, the album has already established a logic of drifting between clarity and dreamlike abstraction. This track leans more heavily into sample manipulation, with SFX textures resembling reversed audio blooming through the mix. It’s mostly instrumental, and the choice to pull the guitars toward the midrange gives it a soft-focus feeling, like a memory replayed imperfectly.
“On Your Mind,” featuring Marina Yozora, continues exploring the effects generated by tape, the limitations of a 4-track recorder, and the backwards-processing motif. Two voices interweave and echo each other. This forms a rounded, full-bodied presence. The combination of reversed textures and layered vocals creates a surreal but grounding emotional effect. There’s a sense of weightlessness here, held together by a rhythmic intuition that keeps everything from floating away completely as the filters open just at the right timing.
“Falling Back Asleep” is one of the most quietly stunning moments on the record. It begins with a clean drum passage (dry, intimate, almost close-mic) before fading into a mix dominated by guitar and a Rhodes-like electric piano sound. The Rhodes becomes a recurring presence across In Airports, offering warmth that feels almost tactile. Each phrase lands like a soft exhale, grounding the song’s otherwise ethereal drift. For me, this track created a meditative state, the feeling of returning to a dream mid-scene, which is only enhanced by how the song ends: in a quiet sampled effect that almost seamlessly blends into the next track.
“Talk In Technicolor” and “Blissful Moon” extend that sensation. Talk In Technicolor blends bright guitars with the subtle fret noises of an acoustic instrument, while mid-low electric piano tones fill out the foundation. Blissful Moon plays with the interaction between a reverberant guitar and what seems to be a hybrid drum approach, blending acoustic kit and machine-like samples. It’s a collision of organic detail and digital artifacts. Another nod to the theme of blurred memory.
The title track “In Airports” stands at the emotional center of the album. Clean acoustic guitars shimmer, joined by midrange guitar or Rhodes textures, and later, a set of classic violin voices that lift the entire piece into something cinematic. The lyricism here is plainspoken and introspective, touching on the tension between creating music and being changed by the process. When Howard sings, “I made it all about me / is that a tragedy,” the question lands gently but decisively. The song explores the way creative identity shifts over time. How listening becomes harder, how self-expectation grows heavier. The production uses space as an instrument, letting each element breathe, and the violins widen the emotional frame without overwhelming it.
“Highway Pileup” and “It Takes A While” bring subtle shifts in harmonic and atmospheric energy. The former introduces an organ-like pad that adds depth and a sense of expansiveness, and breaks from the album’s repetitive motives with a simple but refreshing chord progression. The latter waves are constantly accompanied by the warm flutter of the tape ending with a vinyl or tape crackle; a gesture that fits perfectly within the album’s emphasis on the imperfect imprint of memories. These two tracks feel like small windows opening, letting new air into an already fluid landscape.
“Heart Still Hangs” feels like dust settling on an old photograph, the reverb-heavy aesthetic that has become a signature across the record dominates again, with that touching phrase “my heart still hangs in the air / never know if it’s wrong” as if the weight of tiredness and sleepiness was drifting the mind away.
“In The Dawn,” by contrast, leans heavily into lyrical vulnerability. The song meditates on indecision, timing, and emotional survival, carried by slow-paced vocals and heavier drums. The lyrics take on a more direct emotional clarity: “because you are a light / I hold in my mind”. It resonates without overreaching.
“I’ll Wake Up Soon” returns to cleaner processing, almost as if this were an alternative ending to the previous track. The song weaves in a radio broadcast sample that adds a faintly documentary feel. It feels as if we’re overhearing fragments from another place or time. It ends with an airport or mall-like soundscape, looping the listener back to the album’s thematic locus. It’s a subtle acknowledgment of Orchid Mantis’s ambient roots.
“Orbiting Your Head,” one of the album’s highlights, uses synthesized pad drones with modulated filters to create a sense of slow ascent. The interplay between the pads’ opening/closing envelope motion and the guitar passages gives the track a gentle push-and-pull momentum. The vocals stay soft, the atmosphere remains expansive, and the night soundscape that closes the track feels like stepping into a warm memory. This piece captures the emotional continuity of the entire record. It is uplifting, wistful, and full of suspended motion.
“Strange Heaven” closes the album with more kinetic energy. It’s faster drums and a reversed-sample loop add brightness and motion, while the organ motif maintains the ambient essence. A final wash of reverb and filter sweep dissolves the song into a nature soundscape. The ending feels like release… as if waking from a dream but carrying the feeling with you.
Across all fifteen tracks, In Airports maintains a cohesive sonic identity: heavy reverb, slow vocal delivery, repetitive melodic motives, tape-saturated textures, and a balance between electric and acoustic elements. The production leans into imperfection in ways that enhance emotional transparency. You can hear the fingerprints of the process: loops that wobble noticeably, tones rounded by tape saturation, samples that flicker between forward and reversed states… These aren’t flaws; they’re part of the language Orchid Mantis speaks fluently.
The album was released on November 7, 2025, and while it stands firmly as its own artistic statement, it also feels like a reflective point in Thomas Howard’s long-running project. After years of genre exploration (lo-fi, ambient, indie pop, dream pop), In Airports gathers those threads into a single, steady breath. It doesn’t try to be definitive; instead, it feels lived-in, contemplative, and honest.
In Airports, it earns your subconscious attention. And once you’re inside, it becomes a place you’ll want to return to, the way we revisit the same dream without fully understanding why. Listening to it, I felt myself sinking into a familiar emotional texture of nostalgia and quiet meditation. It is music that holds space rather than filling it, that honors memory without idealizing it, that understands how fragile and beautiful our inner worlds can be, and invites us into appreciating the travellers that enter our lives, even if we are still “stuck, waiting for something just over the horizon”.
Written by Gabi SaltaSoles, producer and storyteller
