New Music: A.S. Fanning – Today is for Forgetting

With a new album and UK tour in the offing, Berlin-based Irish musician A.S. Fanning has dropped the low-key melancholia of Today is for Forgetting.

Three of my favourite artists can be heard whispering in the eaves of Today is for Forgetting. While Fanning’s vocals have a prose-like poise, much in the style of Jacques Brel and Leonard Cohen, the lyrics bring to mind comparisons with fellow Irishman the late Cathal Coughlan.

With a use of words that are reflections of the mundanity of daily existence, interspersed with moments of beauty, Fanning shifts them imperceptibly in space-time, pushing us to see beyond three dimensions, trying to lift the veil on how we perceive our reality.

“This song is about the psychedelic experience, and the feeling of entering some kind of no-man’s-land between this life and the next, or another dimension of existence, not black or white, but grey,” Fanning explains.

“There’s no consecutive sequence in the way time runs. There’s just a central character with various moments and timelines swirling all around him, and it somehow falls upon him to make things make sense.”

“I read a book about octopuses that suggested one of the first things simple organisms developed was a sense of time; before they could see or hear, they had to know whether their surroundings were better or worse than a moment ago.”

“Our sense of time is like sight or hearing; in one way it lets us perceive something real, in another it’s just something we’ve devised to quantify reality in a way that’s useful to us.”

Today Is For Forgetting is the second single from A.S. Fanning’s fourth studio album, Take Me Back To Nowhere, set for release on the 6th of February 2026 via K&F Records.

It’s now up for pre-order in vinyl, digital, and CD formats on Bandcamp. Fanning plays live dates in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK next March – head to Instagram or Facebook for venue details.

Header photo by Neil Hoare