As a touchstone of early-aughts indie rock, Rilo Kiley are a rock band that hit the ground running and never stopped until their tense breakup in 2013. And after twelve long years, they’ve returned – only to find a world of indie rock that they helped to terraform, so unlike the musical world that they were born into.
Stream: ‘The Execution of All Things’ – Rilo Kiley
On May 10th, Los Angeles’ very own Rilo Kiley stepped out on a stage in Pasadena, CA for the Just Like Heaven festival, and the first thing they bore witness to was a whole crowd of people singing along to the opening track, “The Execution of All Things.”
To say that this was an unexpected reunion is an understatement. Jenny Lewis, Blake Sennett, Pierre de Reeder, and Jason Boesel had been living their own lives, musical and personal, for the last decade, and while partial reunions had always been a part of that, the band remained inactive. The announcement at the beginning of 2025 shook many out of their seats, completely taken by surprise at the reunion after the band’s slow, acrimonious split. Rilo Kiley initially entered a hiatus in 2008, disintegrated for the next few years, and was officially being declared finished in 2013. With their 2025 return comes a tidal wave of reappraisals and reminders of the band’s glowing discography, helped by the band issuing a new greatest hits album and reissuing their seminal 2002 album, The Execution of All Things.
For context: In 2002, the wall between indie rock and the elusive, evergreen pastures of the “mainstream” had been crumbling for a while now. Bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes had already been lighting up indie charts and magazine covers, TV and movie syncs were introducing everyday people to indie music, and major labels everywhere were keeping close eyes on epicenters like New York City in a frenzy to sign the best of what’s next.
At the same time, it was still the genre for the hipsters and the “cool” people, those who ardently refused to indulge in the sounds of the modern pop and rock of the day. And why should they? Indie rock is purported to be more authentic, music that truly speaks to the feelings of the alienated. Times were certainly changing for underground music… and yet, many things had stayed the same.
Indie rockers were still scurrying across the country like pack rats, taking every volunteered basement for their sleep and turning every living room into a makeshift stage – doing anything to scratch the never-ending itch that playing live music gave them.
This was Rilo Kiley’s reality in 2002, as a 4-year old band doing their best to perform at any venue they could.
And it was in this environment that the band released their sophomore album, The Execution of All Things, an album that proved to be a massive sonic leap forward for them.
It established so much more of the band’s sound, utilized a recording studio for the first time in band history, and featured several iconic musicians from the underground Omaha, Nebraska scene. All of those elements came together to make what many fans consider Rilo Kiley’s greatest album, a 12-track powerhouse filled with intriguing lyrical tales and dynamic musicality. The sound of its complex, open-hearted emotions steadily seeped out into the musical world in the coming years, turning up in the record collections of tons of indie music fans as a tribute to one of the first albums that truly “got” them.
The album’s story started very soon after the release of Rilo Kiley’s debut album. A homespun batch of energetic and sly indie rock tunes, Take-Offs and Landings released on Barsuk Records in 2001 to a warm critical reception and some unexpectedly decent sales for an indie release. This gave Rilo Kiley the ambition necessary to expand their sound on their next album, and serendipitously, that’s when they ran into Tim Kasher of the Omaha band The Good Life. After some conversation, the band decided to hightail it to the city to, in Lewis’ own words, “work and exploit the booming music scene.”
Now signed to Omaha’s Saddle Creek Records, the band recorded the entire album in a matter of weeks in March 2002, having done lots of pre-production to finish it so quickly. And so, that October 1st, the indie rock world bore witness to Execution and its morose, vast, varied, and deeply human views on the world that they inhabited.
The album’s increase of quality from Take-Offs and their first EP, Rilo Kiley/The Initial Friend, is not lost on the listener, with every aspect of the mix being occupied by beautiful soundscape-y keyboards or intricate guitar interplays. That, and the album’s focus on the melancholy, is made immediately obvious by the opening track, “The Good That Won’t Come Out.”
Not even a minute into the album’s runtime, Lewis invites the listener to discuss the modern age, friends who have “lost the war,” and the apocalyptic thought of climate change, backed by low-fidelity drum machines and organs. “The Good That Won’t Come Out” such a claustrophobic tone setter, with Lewis sing-whispering each line behind a vocal filter like it’s a clandestine confession of how hurt she’s been by the world and herself, complete with a true wham line.
It’s only through Jason Boesel’s crashing, distorted drums – his triumphant introduction to the Rilo Kiley universe – that the track explodes and releases all the pent-up energy it’s been building. The fidelity increase is a breath of fresh air from how the song starts, starting a chain reaction that carries out through the rest of the album.
“You say I choose sadness,
that it never once has chosen me
maybe you’re right.”
While this record isn’t necessarily a “concept album” that tells a unified story, the sequencing and pacing will have one think otherwise.
After the dynamic opening track that leads into the midnight, melancholic tones of “Paint’s Peeling,” the album brightens up (sonically) with “The Execution of All Things,” where simplicity shines in the tight rhythm section, which allows the track to be decorated by guitar screeches, atmospheric synthesizer work, and genuine strings. It’s a defining moment in Rilo Kiley’s catalogue, doing so much with such a simple song at the core. The album snakes its way through with softer songs like “So Long” and “With Arms Outstretched” and menacing rockers like “My Slumbering Heart” and “Three Hopeful Thoughts,” but the true connecting glue of the album lies within the tales spun throughout it.
The album’s lyrics are predominantly written by Jenny Lewis, and her writings were much more personal and realistic than the pictures that many of her contemporaries were painting. About every song of hers on the album has one or more particular lines of simple, elegantly processed pain. The album’s lyrics exist worlds away from early Rilo Kiley’s innocence, demonstrating a band that contains multitudes. A band that can write about a 1950s dance craze and the impending climate change crisis in a matter of years truly deserves some recognition. Execution‘s morose, sophisticated lyrics showcase Rilo Kiley’s furthered evolution from their delightfully twee pop debut EP Rilo Kiley, trading 1950s traditional pop pastiches and sweet boy-girl discussions in for intense self-deprecation and decaying mental health. It’s seen on tracks like “Paint’s Peeling,” a haunting rock track where Lewis communicates such large emotions with a few notable pre-chorus lines:
“And I feel nothing, not sane
It’s a hard day for dreaming again.”
When the song finally cascades upon the listener, with Lewis aggressively recounting a night where the song’s target asks her simply, “How could you love me this way?” it’s a release that feels hollow and satisfying at the same time. The song shouts, but it offers no answer to her target’s question. These type of straightforward, layered lyrical conceits appear throughout the album, such as the faux-country-and-western track “Hail To Whatever You Found in the Sunlight That Surrounds You,” where minimalism reigns to illustrate such a massive difference between two people with a point-blank line like “And the weather changes, not halfway between your house and mine.” Even the happier-sounding tracks like “My Slumbering Heart” have lines like “And it’s become just like a chemical stress / tracing the lines in my face for / something more beautiful than is there,” with Lewis prepared to accept the impossibility of the realities that she always dreams of but never reaches. Sennett’s lyrical contributions on his songs are also key to the general themes, as “So Long” and “Three Hopeful Thoughts” also get right to the point with snappy commentary. “All this talk of your sweet girlfriend / Is starting to pay off / And the charms that you got from travel / Are starting to wear off,” he says in the latter, vindicated by the downfall of someone he used to care about. It’s these lyrical throughlines that unite the tracks under a banner of general unease, with dissatisfaction being the rule of the land and wry commentary being its lingua franca.
However, the album’s centerpiece and defining lyrical moment for Lewis comes in with track six, “A Better Son/Daughter.”
In a scene that must be painfully familiar to much of the album’s audience, Lewis is paralyzed in bed by fear and loathing for the world, cursing out her mother for her insolence in assuming “that it’s different this time,” and lamenting the death of her innocence with the passing of time. It’s at her lowest point that she triumphantly decides to turn her life around. She declares her intent to be rebelliously optimistic, determined to show up for work with a smile, live life with her friends, and speaks to herself and the listener with a triumphant, resolute mantra. In the midst of a life defined by depression and pessimism, her determination to survive and thrive in spite of it all is truly inspiring. It’s a rousing speech, punctuated by triumphant horn-like synths and guitars and marching band-like drums, and serves to uplift no matter what.
“You’ll be a real good listener
You’ll be honest, you’ll be brave
You’ll be handsome and you’ll be beautiful
You’ll be happy.”
“You’re weak but not giving in
And you’ll fight it, you’ll go out fighting all of them.”
Another lyrical highlight is “And That’s How I Choose To Remember It.” Fragmented after three separate songs on the album, the hidden track details the events that Lewis’ family went through after her mother and father faced a messy divorce. Lewis’ delivery is childlike, with the wispy organ and misty singing saw conjuring a sort of warped girlhood memory filled with vague suggestions towards hazy details. Lewis wanders through these memories like a lost child herself; recounting a trip to Alaska to visit her father, seeing odd sights and meeting kids like her, she recalls it all in such a way that obscures the true, deeper feelings within each scene – like she chose to remember it this way.
“I was lookin’ at my feet because
It was perfect and the air was clean
And my dad was there, it was summer’s last eve
And that’s how I choose to remember it.”
The album’s lyrical content feels so interconnected that when it reaches its conclusion in “Spectacular Views,” it feels as though an undercurrent of the album is finally released when Lewis shouts, at the top of her lungs, “It’s so F*ING beautiful!” as she bears witness to the vastness of the universe over the palisades in the song and accepts her place in it once and for all. After an album filled with anxieties over the uncontrollable and the controllable, hearing the band crescendo right into that euphoric line sends shockwaves straight through the listener’s ears. Lewis considers her writing style to be more of a mix of emotions than being a unified statement of grief.
“There’s just this underlying darkness, but somewhere there’s hope. When I think about my favorite songwriters or even my favorite movies, there’s always a bit of hope. Even in the darkest of stories you sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said in 2002. The natural beauty of “With Arms Outstretched” leading into the triumphant blood-pumping of “Spectacular Views” illustrate the side of her that’s willing to see past the darkness and become truly appreciative of the world, temporarily diverging from the wry and morose textures of the album to indulge in pure, unbridled energy. It serves to prove that Lewis is capable of choosing happiness just as she is capable of choosing sadness. As a passage in the former mentions,
“Now, some days, they last longer than othersBut this day by the lake went too fastAnd if you want me, you better speak upI won’t waitSo you better move fast!”
Sonically, the album is a step forward for Rilo Kiley in its arrangements, being far more fleshed out and dynamic than anything that they had done before.
In addition to the core band, Execution benefits from the Saddle Creek Records orchestra, with the label’s communal confederation of musicians teaming up to back their foreign friends Rilo Kiley. Having been exposed to Bright Eyes’ Fevers and Mirrors (with Lewis and Sennett appearing on the band’s album Lifted as well), the band were excited to use the sounds of Saddle Creek to expand their sonic horizons. Producer Mike Mogis in particular adds an array of instruments like banjo and pedal steel guitar to many of the album’s songs, with members such as Jiha Lee of The Good Life appearing to give “Hail to Whatever” a wistful flute part, Gretta Cohn of Cursive appearing on cello on “The Execution of All Things” and “Capturing Moods” (joined by Amy Huffman on violin, who also shows up on Saddle Creek albums), and Tim Kasher of both bands adding a sweet sounding accordion to “So Long.” Bright Eyes’ leader and Saddle Creek’s golden boy, Conor Oberst, even makes an appearance in the “boy choir” of “With Arms Outstretched,” with Mike’s brother A.J. in the fold as well. Their contribution, with Sennett and Boesel singing as well, feel like a campfire sing-a-long that perfectly compliments the track’s peaceful nature.
There’s something to be said about the strength of Lewis, Sennett, de Reeder, and Boesel, however; their energies combine to make all of the songs on here explode. In contemporary interviews, Rilo Kiley had told journalists how they were planning to make Execution sound much more like their live act than Takeoffs was – and it shows with barnburning rock tracks that blend in perfectly with the mildly orchestral elements that the band bring to the fold. The string section on the syrupy-yet-tough ballad “Capturing Moods” dances with loud guitars and crashing drums, and the odd synth- and string-laden intro of “The Execution of All Things” gets hard-cut by Lewis’ rock-solid bass line in perfect contrast, while proceeding to decorate the rest of the song. Playing musical chairs with their instruments helps, too – several songs see bassist de Reeder pick up the guitar for twinkling interplay with Sennett, while rhythm guitarist/keyboardist Lewis (who would admit to having rudimentary skills on bass in 2002) would play bass for tracks like “The Execution of All Things,” “Three Hopeful Thoughts,” as well as “Capturing Moods.” Her skills on the instrument provide a straightforward basis for all the songs to build nicely upon, while de Reeder’s bass work is dependable and just as tasteful as the best of them. All of this is backed by the band’s then-new drummer, Jason Boesel, who compliments the existing trio so well that his propulsive beat makes the songs in cases like “Hail to Whatever” or the iconic, determined marching band of “A Better Son/Daughter.”
This album’s live dynamic shows particularly in the work of Blake Sennett on lead guitar and vocals, who lights a song like the jaunty and twee pop-like “My Slumbering Heart” on fire for its punk rock bridge. Its righteous, shredding guitar solo, paired up with him harmonizing with Lewis over the desperate desire to awake from a dreamworld next to a partner, is a serious album highlight, punctuated perfectly by him shouting the song’s title. Of course, Sennett’s influence is most felt on his tunes, which are led by his soft, Elliott Smith-like crooning in comparison to Lewis’ direct, yet personable delivery.
“So Long” is a lovely song filled with low-fidelity melodies and hushed tones that sees off a partner who never did much for the relationship, and “Three Hopeful Thoughts” turns that exact same line of thinking into a steadfast garage rocker that literally concludes with the sentiment “And I hope that you die tonight / just close your eyes, there goes the light.” While Sennett was no longer the sole creative vision for the band as he was in the band started, his work gives the album such flavor that cannot be replicated.
Lewis’ voice itself is definitely an iconic part of Rilo Kiley’s sound, as it mutates from immature character-playing like in “And That’s How I Choose To Remember It” and “My Slumbering Heart,” dour whispering that almost feels like sprechgesang like in “The Good That Won’t Come Out” and “A Better Son/Daughter,” and spite-drenched delivery for “The Execution of All Things” and “Paint’s Peeling.” It captures her lyrical ideas so well, as listeners can practically feel her gentle yet venomous-sounding grin when she delivers lines like “It’s the guilt and forever wakefulness of the weak / it’s just you and me,” or when she generates pure sympathy in others like “And I don’t mind waiting / if it takes a long long time.”
All of these elements animate the record so well, practically filling it to the brim with dynamic musicianship – from “Spectacular Views” being a four minute thunderstorm of rock bordering on the emo that many of Rilo Kiley’s contemporaries were practicing, to the sprawling “With Arms Outstretched” that evokes the vast peace of life with acoustic guitars and glockenspiels carrying Lewis’ wide open melodies. In general, the band is in top form on Execution, and their energy as a unit bleeds right out of the vinyl wax and into the mind.
Even in the darkest of stories you sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel.
* * *
As a record, The Execution of All Things carries itself like the important album that it truly is.
It has throughlines of reoccurring themes and elements across such a varied set of songs that blends melodious indie rock, emo, folk, lo-fi, twee pop, and punk, culminating in an album that truly feels like a cinematic experience. The stories that the songs tell are so realistic and personal that they feel particularly tailor-made to connect with audiences, with much of the human experience being recorded in authentic, vignette-like displays, paired with truly electric performances from all musicians involved. It’s no wonder how this album proved to be a touchstone for dozens of indie rock artists in the future, eager to follow in the footsteps of the band that meant so much to them.
And indeed, the album’s predominantly female voice singing about topics like mental health and self-immolation delivered through literate shades of indie rock has no doubt contributed to the increasing number of female and non-binary voices entering the world of music. Musicians from all types of indie and alternative acts – folk-country artists like Waxahatchee, power pop purveyors like Liz Stokes of The Beths and Eva Hendricks of Charly Bliss, indie pop writers like Hop Along, Hannah Judge, and Anna McClellan – have all cited Rilo Kiley and Jenny Lewis specifically as a major inspiration; a woman who used indie rock to illustrate her own tales that not many had been willing to hear during Rilo Kiley’s imperial era. Lewis was one of the most pre-eminent female figures in indie rock at the time, taking house shows across the country and sleeping on floors in search of a life in independent music. Her example has no doubt served as an inspiration for major female acts like Boygenius, Japanese Breakfast, and Mitski to spread their influence worldwide.
There was no way that Lewis, Rilo Kiley, or any of the bands at the time could have predicted the proliferation of indie rock in the modern age, where acts under independent labels appear to headline festivals and “best of” playlists from major outlets.
Even as the world of independent music was starting to fuse with that of the mainstream in the 2000s, it was astonishing to see an independent act appear on TV in the form of a sync or a live appearance – now it’s commonplace enough that any of the acts from that era would be shocked to learn that their artistry has reached so many.
And so, it is no wonder that for Just Like Heaven, when the band walked out to the stage to a tape recording of the album transition to “The Execution of All Things,” when Lewis’ thumping bass line joined her immortal lines “Soldiers come quickly; I feel the Earth beneath my feet,” the giddiness felt from the crowd was palpable. Cheers punctured the post-choruses, Sennett’s guitar soloing, and just about every other element of the song. Of course the audience was beyond thrilled; in a way, despite the massive surprise, it was almost obvious that they’d return. This side of the musical world that Rilo Kiley helped create was shaped in a way that would easily let them back in with open arms, as a headlining act for a festival celebrating the past while acknowledging the future that they are partially responsible for.
The way that time had unfolded really only served to cement Rilo Kiley’s triumphant return to activity, buoyed by the changing tides of indie rock that they helped set into motion two decades prior.
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© courtesy of the artist
The Execution of All Things
an album by Rilo Kiley
