In creating the more starkly composed songs heard throughout ​Everything Seems Like Yesterday,​ Carnevale made a point of placing a more careful focus on his lyrics, partly drawing from his burgeoning love of poets like Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, and Sylvia Plath. “If you can read a song as a poem and still get the same feeling from it, you know you’ve done something right,” he says. “I’m sure I have plenty of songs from the old days that would really lack something if you took away the music and the melody, but these new songs feel more connected to when I first started writing—back before the main concern was mostly just trying to get people to dance.”

As they gear up for the release of ​Everything Seems Like Yesterday​, The Frights are building up the album’s tracks in order to accommodate the unhinged energy of their live performance. But for Carnevale, the album will always maintain an undeniable intimacy. “When this was going to be a solo record, I had it in the back of my mind that it would really just be for my friends and my family,” he says. “And to be completely honest, that’s still 100 percent what I want from this album. There’s a lot of stuff on there that’s about things that people close to me have gone through, and in a way the songs are just me trying to talk through them, and get a very personal message across without really worrying about anything else.”