Chicago indie rock band Edens channel decades of love, memory, and change into “Empty Details,” a radiant, propulsive song whose churning guitars and vivid Windy City snapshots give life’s most incidental fragments the weight of lasting emotional landmarks.

Stream: “Empty Details” – Edens

Memory rarely waits for us to stop moving.

It catches us in storefront glass, on streets we once walked with people we love, in the sudden realization that years have changed both the view and the person looking back.

Edens give that experience a living pulse on “Empty Details,” a captivating indie rock reverie whose radiant guitars and churning momentum press forward as they look back on love, change, and the selves preserved inside familiar places. Its emotional charge comes from that friction between reflection and motion, where looking back becomes part of searching for the road ahead.

The title lands as its own bittersweet thesis: The details we dismiss as incidental – a passing reflection, an afternoon preserved on film, plastic flags above an old car lot – are often the very fragments that tell us where we have been, who we have loved, and how far we have traveled.

We measured our steps
Carefully down the avenue
Empty details
Holding court on broken things

Brand new camera
Document the afternoon
Writing our plans
On permanent plastic flags

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Empty Details,” the captivating lead single and opening track from Chicago indie rock quintet Edens’ upcoming debut album, Static Fiction (out October 23 via Dedd Foxx). Steeped in memory, movement, and the strange ways time reshapes the places we know, the nine-song record captures a band looking back on where they’ve been while charging eagerly toward whatever comes next.

Edens may be making their full-length debut, but the friendships at their core stretch back decades. Singer/guitarist Jonathan Burden, drummer Pete Gray, bassist Crawfie Ward, guitarist Josh Shell, and keyboardist Adam Penly came up through overlapping northern and central Illinois and Iowa music scenes, with current and former ties to Tiger Bones, Laureates, Paul Cary and the Small Scarys, Reserver, Moon Mannequin, and Chalet Chalet.

What began as an excuse for old friends to play together again after parenthood, careers, and the ordinary detours of adulthood quickly became a creative force of its own. Original songs replaced the covers they intended to learn; two EPs followed in 2021 and 2022; and with the current lineup in place, Edens began operating with a renewed sense of purpose.

This shared history gives Edens an instinctive chemistry, while Chicago gives their music a physical world to inhabit.

The city is embedded in the band’s friendships, rehearsals, imagery, and creative process – a landscape where the past keeps colliding with the present.

“We saw ourselves become different people over time, reflected in all the neighborhood storefront windows. The more I think about this record, I think it’s really cool that it was sort of born and raised completely in Chicago,” Burden tells Atwood Magazine. “It was written, recorded, mixed, mastered and pressed here. The cover art is by a local artist. The design and layout was done here by a former bandmate and me. Lyrically it may be a bit more abstract, but I’m definitely thinking about my life here.”

“Empty Details” carries that history with tremendous kinetic force. Gray’s driving drums keep the ground moving beneath a rush of propulsive electric guitars, their radiant lines circling as Burden’s insistent, impassioned vocal presses ever onward. The whole band plays with a sense of momentum – restless without becoming frantic, reflective without losing its pulse.

Drawing a breath or two
And hold it beneath the moon
Counting the stares
We took from your house to theirs

Its opening images arrive like snapshots pulled from an old roll of film: “We measured our steps / Carefully down the avenue,” followed by a camera documenting an afternoon and plans written “on permanent plastic flags.” These are fragments rather than a linear story, but their specificity gives the past texture. Burden has traced those plastic flags to the used-car lots lining Chicago’s Western Avenue, while the recurring storefront reflection becomes a far more intimate marker of time: “We saw ourselves today / In the storefront display.”

We saw ourselves today
In the storefront display
We saw ourselves today
In the storefront display

We’re searching to find our own way out
Considering all remaining doubts
We’re searching to find our own way out
Considering all remaining doubts

Then the song pushes outward. “We’re searching to find our own way out / Considering all remaining doubts,” Burden sings as the arrangement surges beneath him, the repetition making the search itself sound ongoing. Edens never resolve that tension so much as inhabit it. Memory keeps interrupting motion; motion keeps carrying memory with it. The guitars press harder, the rhythm section digs in, and Burden sings like he is trying to reach the other side without surrendering everything gathered along the way.

Its sharpest line arrives almost matter-of-factly: “Pain can change its shape / But it never disappears.” Burden later compares that persistence to an old scar on a healthy maple tree – evidence of damage and recovery living together in the same body. Within “Empty Details,” the lyric opens the song beyond romantic nostalgia. Years pass. Relationships deepen. People become parents, spouses, friends, strangers to earlier versions of themselves. What happened before remains present, even after its shape has changed.

That tension between memory and momentum courses through Static Fiction as a whole.

Edens have described the album as a record for driving – music shaped by the Midwestern ritual of long roads, mixtapes, college radio, flat horizons, and the unexpected memories that surface when the landscape stretches out in front of you. Across nine songs, the band pull from decades of shared listening and playing while embracing the chemistry of who they are now. Static Fiction looks backward with clear eyes, but its gaze remains fixed on whatever might still be waiting down the road.

“Empty Details” makes the perfect doorway into that world because it moves exactly the way memory does: backward and forward at once. Its hook pulls hard, its guitars gleam and drive, and its lyrics give ordinary images the weight of emotional landmarks. By the end, those supposedly empty details are carrying entire lives inside them – proof that a storefront reflection, an afternoon photograph, or a familiar avenue can preserve far more than we realize while we are passing through.

Pain can change its shape
But it never disappears
We never defined our hearts
We just washed away each other’s tears

We saw ourselves today
In the storefront display
We saw ourselves today
In the storefront display

Atwood Magazine recently caught up with Burden and Gray to talk about old friendships finding new creative life, the Chicago roots running through Static Fiction, the memories behind “Empty Details,” and the music that still keeps Edens searching for their own way forward. Dive into our full conversation below, and stream “Empty Details” exclusively below!

Look closely as the scenery passes – the details that seem empty now may be the ones that stay with us the longest.

We’re searching to find our own way out
Considering all remaining doubts
We’re searching to find our own way out
Considering all remaining doubts

— —

:: stream/purchase Empty Details here ::

:: connect with Edens here ::

— —

Stream: “Empty Details” – Edens

A CONVERSATION WITH EDENS

Jonathan Burden: Thanks for digging the single and putting us out there! We’re just a bunch of guys who’ve been playing music for a long time and we’ve found ourselves together again after life stuff happens and being compelled to continue to make music and it clicking again like it did when we were young, but with all the music and life experience behind us. The thing started as a lark but it organically became something bigger than the sum of its parts.

Pete Gray: We’re lucky as hell and we just can’t quit. Edens is a new band of old friends, so there’s this shared language and lifetimes between us that make things come together real nice.

Jonathan Burden: For me personally, lifetime north stars are REM, Depeche Mode, Dead Kennedys, Misfits, Harry Nilsson, Link Wray… tough question to narrow down, but all those artists changed my brain! Song craft is what I’m most excited about these days. I have always been a musical person, but I was more of a band member (a bass player to be specific) for a long time. Then about 15 years ago in Tiger Bones, I really put myself out there as a songwriter/front person (though still playing bass). I pushed myself further in Edens by playing guitar too. So, song craft and the collaboration with these guys, what everyone adds to the mix.

Pete Gray: Real talk – the drums owe a big debt to OutKast Stankonia!

Jonathan Burden: We all came from these scenes, and maybe years ago toured together or heard about each other, etc., that thing that happens when you’re young in the ’90s or early ’00s. We all generally made our way to Chicago and a very incestuous thing happens with various bands, but really it’s about this extended group of similar-minded friendship. So…  Tiger Bones ending basically coincided with my daughter being born and parenthood was the main thing. Over time, I’m still writing and playing at home and there comes a time to maybe want to do this with other people again. Pete and Crawfie were in somewhat similar places, so a casual thing started between us, and relatively quickly that became a situation where all these original ideas were organically flowing out of us and it really worked. So you step back and look at it and it’s a band.

Pete Gray: I’ve been in a bunch of bands with Crawfie and we just go together like beans and cornbread. We met Adam from a Craigslist ad looking for a guitar player for a former band (Laureates) during the Bush administration. I first met Josh when we worked together at a nonprofit 20 years ago and he asked to see what music I had on my iPod. Aside from being a great musician, Josh lives a block from our rehearsal space so we figured if we asked him to join the band, he’d probably show up to practice.

Jonathan Burden: The early origins of the band were more of a statement of “we’re out here working on something, let’s see what happens.” It was a smaller core and didn’t “stick” yet. Once this version of the band fell into place, with the core plus Josh and Adam, suddenly the energy was operating on a higher level, and it seemed we all were ready to create something together. Maybe a lot of the seed ideas originate from me, but this is really a collaboration where we are all contributing or pushing each other in the most productive ways, and making the songs the best versions of themselves.

Jonathan Burden: Yes, this record is really more of a cohesive statement of “who we are.” I feel really good about it and the sounds and the way it came together. Reflecting on everything we’ve been before this point, all the north stars’ influence on me and everyone else, all the bands we’ve been in prior and how that shapes our choices and decisions as a group of creative people. I am very excited to share what we’ve done with the world. And honestly it gives me a lot of motivation for working on the new material as well – that’s the looking forward part. There is an axiom (maybe?) that finishing a creative project propels you to the next, if you are connected to the creative flow state. This record still isn’t out but new ideas are already being formed.

Jonathan Burden: It’s easy to agonize over details like sequencing and things like that. Josh was the one that nailed it for us and he made a compelling case for the order of songs. It has vibes and tone and sets the stage for everything after. I think it’s got a hook right off the bat, I like hooks, and I want to bring listeners in and along for the ride. If there’s a chance I can capture some ears with this then I believe they will hang with us for the next 30-40 minutes. It was always the front runner for a single.

Jonathan Burden: Hmm well it started with the music. In the practice space, I started running up that chorus chord progression and then the verses got ironed out a bit. Everybody touched the song in some way. Lyrically I think it started as gibberish but I have words I keep to the side that come from different places. I seem to recall “we measured our steps” was the first thing. Then, I just started thinking a lot about the early courtship years between me and my wife in the Chicago that existed in the late 90’s and early 00s before we got married, and the places we’d haunt and then how we’ve grown and changed over the course of decades. I don’t do story songs too well – Pete is better at that lyrically. So this one is more memory fragments, and those things by nature are surreal (to me), which is why I think I gravitated to more found footage/surreal dreamstate aesthetic for the video.

Jonathan Burden: Thank you! I can’t really take credit for it. It’s a sentiment that I’ve read or heard a few different ways, and had definitely written down. But again it’s life – it can be marriage, parenthood, friendship, and it all gets wrapped with everything else. It’s a type of invisible scar I suppose, and we carry these things with us wherever we go. We have this big maple tree and there is this huge gnarly scar from maybe a lightning strike or damage from ages ago, and the tree is healthy but the evidence of hurt and recovery is really interesting to me.

Jonathan Burden: Honestly I think it was more of an after the fact realization than a conscious choice that shaped anything. During the mixing and mastering process when you really have to listen to the record a lot, I began daydreaming and that type of imagery started swirling. Memories of driving around, mix tapes, and college radio, being exposed to sounds it didn’t even occur to me could be out there. The things that become your north stars. So I do think, as we began talking about sequencing it, and naming the record, and it becoming real, that’s when it dawned on me that we could be part of that thru-line.

Pete Gray: Long drives into a flat horizon give you a chance to think. There’s nothing to do, memories float up out of nowhere and music and landscapes you thought you knew can show up differently. The lyrics on “Reach Me” came out of a long drive to a friend’s funeral. Cars and car culture are killing us but a lot of dear memories and stories come out of road trips. Edens is a name for paradise and also for a disgusting crowded freeway that cuts through Chicago – we live with all kinds of contradictions and carry a bunch of them into the music.

Jonathan Burden: It’s there. I mean we do all of our rehearsals in the heart of the city so we are very much a Chicagoland enterprise, including everything you mentioned. Pretty much every piece of this has its origins here. David Castillo Foster, who made the collages we used on the front and back covers is an incredible local artist. Mike Lust is a legendary Chicago engineer. Chicago Mastering. Totally stoked to use Smashed Plastic for the first time as a local pressing plant. The whole 9 yards. So, it’s just there. But lyrically it’s there too, in “Empty Details” for example “permanent plastic flags” is really from all the old car dealerships along Western Ave. A lot of it is more abstract and less literal. I do think though the refrain in “Worn Out Welcome” is referring to Chicago too: “When I come home I’m not alone.”

Pete Gray: We don’t suffer too much polish or pretense here and the bar is high for good music, so we’re trying to do that justice. The name of the band has Chicago roots and I don’t think these songs would have happened anywhere else.

Jonathan Burden: Spend time with it. Take it with you. Hope you all find the little tiny little embellishments that I found and love about it too.

Pete Gray: These songs shape-shifted many times before we put them down on the record. I think we got them pretty much right by the end.

Jonathan Burden: I went through an LA Country-Rock phase after visiting the Country Music Hall of Fame last year (think Byrds, Gram Parsons, Gene Clark…). Love the newish Aldous Harding. Also recently revisited the first few Echo & the Bunnymen records and was shocked at how contemporary they sound.

Pete Gray: Reserver and Moon Mannequin and Mammals are part of the family and we highly recommend them. We’re playing the record release show with Palace Guard and Wet Chain who are awesome.

— —

:: stream/purchase Empty Details here ::

:: connect with Edens here ::

— —

Stream: “Empty Details” – Edens

— — — —

Connect to Edens on
Facebook, Bandcamp, Instagram

Discover new music on Atwood Magazine

 © Dan Wendt

:: Stream Edens ::