Krill Return After 11 Years With Secret Language

By Elena Vasquez

Krill will release Secret Language, their first new album in 11 years, marking the return of the Boston indie-rock band that broke up in 2015. The record is part reunion, part reevaluation — a set of songs that takes up both weighty and intimate questions with the benefit of time and distance.

Who were Krill?

In the early 2010s, in the greater Boston area — specifically in the places where overeducated, underpaid millennial rock fans congregated — a rallying cry circulated: "Krill forever!" The phrase came from the band's quasi-anthem, "Theme From Krill," a track that exemplified their approach: existential, ramshackle songs filled with oblique takes on ethics and morality, delivered through singer and bassist Jonah Furman's insistent, nasal voice.

The band's references ran wide. They reached from Kierkegaard to Boston's public transportation system. Their songs posed high-minded philosophical questions — "What's the proper orientation of my self to my non-self?" — and also imagined what it is like to feel, literally, like a piece of shit.

Indie rock has long had a neurotic contingent. What set Krill apart, for this listener, was the way they turned that anxious spiral toward larger moral quandaries. For anyone attuned to the weary breakdown of the world, anyone obsessed with questions of righteousness and justice, Krill's tangled riffs were a worthy companion inside a maze of unsolvable problems. Their songs even offered a sense of humor about the hopelessness of it all.

Why did the band break up in 2015?

Krill released three albums and a handful of EPs, achieving cult status within the northeastern indie-rock scene. But opining about moral responsibility from within a band eventually started to feel futile. In 2015, Krill broke up.

The members took jobs more directly aligned with their values:

• labor organizing
• public housing
• civil rights law

Furman says he had also simply run out of things to say. "I felt I had expressed myself," he said in a recent interview. "I hadn't lived enough to say more."

What does Secret Language change?

Years passed. Members moved from city to city. A series of nauseating presidential elections made the stakes of their new jobs seem increasingly dire, in this writer's estimation. And after some more living, Furman returned to songwriting — as it turns out, he had more to say.

The result is Secret Language. The album arrives more than a decade after the breakup, and it frames the band's old preoccupations — ethics, morality, selfhood — through accumulated experience rather than youthful urgency.

For a band that once sang about the proper orientation of the self, the reunion itself answers an old question: the songs still had somewhere to go.