Representing a slew of influences that span the past three or four decades of popular music recording within the confines of a single album may seem like a daunting challenge to any modern artist, but the brave souls drawn together to form Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti dutifully tagged the music scene with their interpretations of each era’s highlights. Indeed, Before Today can be heard in some respects as an homage album, offering the front man’s heart felt respect and thanks to his musical forbearers via his most recent active band.

“Round and Round”, the album’s fifth song and the track receiving 4AD’s strongest promotional support, glides smoothly and perpetually along, speaking to the comforting cyclicality of life for over five minutes. Drummer Aaron Sperkse provides a pillowy backbeat around which Tim Koh’s bass line circles. The text and atmospheric backdrop develop and dominate until the first chorus enters at the 2:00 mark, when a choir of voices rings out reassuringly, “Hold on I’m calling/Calling back to the ball/And we’ll dazzle them all.” The following number, “Beverly Kills,” allows Koh to stretch out a bit more, offering the bass player space to slap and pluck a line beneath falsetto vocals during the highly danceable refrain. In “Butt-House Blondies,” Mardsen Greif-Neill’s juxtaposition of clean and distorted verse and chorus calls to mind a certain “teen spirit” and lends Before Today a great deal of contrast.

The Los Angeles native collective has spent the last month circling Europe in support of its first official recorded effort, but beginning July 9^th, domestic fans will have a chance to celebrate the influence that forgone generations retain among artists of today. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s U.S. tour begins in their hometown and pushes eastward throughout the month before the band circles back to the West Coast, and in that time the group hopes to reveal to enthusiastic fans the inevitable presence of the past in the current musical moment.