Kayla Janowitz’s music as After Ours rings with a quiet familiarity.  Both conversational and full of spark, the seven songs that make up the new album Imaginary Friend trace the varied entanglements of love lost and then grown, into what feels like her most emboldened, candid work yet. Originally hailing from Bergen County, New Jersey, Janowitz was surrounded by a musical family: her mother had performed as a classically trained opera singer in Hong Kong before relocating to America, and she was heavily influenced by her “wizard on guitar” brother who introduced her to eclectic genres such as punk, jazz, alternative, and classic rock.  Her first foray into making music in her teens was performing covers (“I never learned in the traditional way – I learned chords by learning songs first,”) and Janowitz’s original music still incorporates this idea of trusting a feeling first, with sparse, lyric-driven song structures that keeps her instinctual aptitude for songwriting at the forefront.  

Janowitz’s first songs of her own stemmed from a period of health issues in her early twenties, where she had time to sit with herself and “find solace in her love of music”.  Working with indie musician Hether, the pair began on a series of initially long-distance voice memos and ideas that led to her debut self-titled record in 2023.  Melding soulful, seamless production with a quirky, laidback sonic palette, the album remains a capsule of ideas and inspiration from a creatively fertile time in Janowitz’s life where she uprooted to Los Angeles.  Needled in exploration, it’s a sonic imprint of a place she’s already left behind, but not forgotten.  

Imaginary Friend leans into the personal trajectory that her life has taken since. Half written in New York, half while she still lived in Los Angeles, the record was recorded over a period of ten days with Josef Kuhn in his Nashville studio, and mixed by Al Carlson (Jessica Pratt, Weyes Blood, Arthur) in New York.  From poignant opener “Cherry Ears,” the bones of which were written four years ago prior, Janowitz paints a memoriam of a past relationship, and wrestles with the idea of what love really is or is not.  Much as you evolve through different iterations of yourself, Janowitz had sat with versions of multiple tracks for years before they felt both able to stand on their own.  “Every song is so different to the song before or after,” she explains.  Tracklisted chronologically, the older and newer songs are bookended by a cover of MGMT’s “Congratulations,” an anthem of indie adolescence and coming of age.  Often music itself becomes ingrained in specific life experience, and this is Janowitz’s chance to rewrite history from a new perspective. .

While Imaginary Friend is frank about Janowitz navigating intense emotion, there’s always a dash of humor and self-awareness that permeates each song (“in any uncomfortable scenario I’m going to be funny about it”).  It’s this dedication to moving onward and upwards that pushes the album forward.  “I swing, I swing, I swing,” she intones in the upbeat “Met Life.”  Regardless of her past, she’s adamant that it’s worth trying again.  The only song that’s not about romantic love, the twang-y, acoustic number “I Know You” humanizes the experience of it.  “You’re just like me / it’s hard to be who you are,” she sings, and it’s a version of forgiveness, to those who have caused her pain as well as her past self.  “One Last Time” is the only song not pulled from personal experience and is more or less a “classic breakup song” in the vein of Alvvays.  Most of the record’s takes landed on the first try, and you can hear the rawness that still permeates each track.  
Imaginary Friend is about “coming into this version of myself that’s always been there,” and penultimate track “Little Number” ruminates on what it’s like to finally let go of the past and embrace what’s to come (“in the end / it’s all fucked up /  but I’m set free”).  At its core, the record retains that child-like wonder if not naivety that comes from experiencing anything for the first time, from the headrush of infatuation to the heartbreak that can come from just existing in the world.  The EP ends with the gentle strum of  “Different Now,” a track Janowitz wrote as an attempt to cope with the permanence of change, and how that resilience has changed her for the better.  “The essence of the project is in the last two songs,” she explains, and you can sense an involuntary shift that means no looking back.  After all, After Ours is meant to encompass what happens next, and as much as every song pinpoints a milestone, it’s up to Janowitz to now carve out a path to her future.