For much of the 2010s, Tim Presley—a.k.a. White Fence—was keeping pace with Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer for the title of busiest psych-rocker in San Francisco. Across a steady stream of albums, Presley gradually emerged from a bedroom-brewed lo-fi haze to pursue a more radiant art-pop vision.
But as Presley would later admit, this furiously productive period can’t entirely be chalked up to a burst of divine inspiration; his most fruitful years also ran parallel to his opioid addiction. He has described his experience as a total withdrawal from everyday life and relationships, a time when he’d “just sit and write music.” Then, once he committed to getting clean, in 2015, it “felt like Samson, the strong man, got his haircut.” His creative abilities were decimated: “I had lost my power to create music,” he explained, “and that scared the shit out of me because that’s the only thing I know.”
No score yet, be the first to add.
That sense of what now? disorientation could be felt on 2019’s I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk, which extinguished the last vestiges of home-recording hiss from the White Fence palette, but whose cleaner production only seemed to magnify Presley’s inherent eccentricities. “There’s always a danger in leaving the past,” he repeated on the Syd-Barrett-goes-to-church hymn “Fog City”—and it would take him another seven years to let go of it for good.
If I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk was the sound of Presley feeling his way through the dark, Orange, his latest, sees him coming out the other side and basking in the sunshine. With his old pal Segall behind the boards and the kit, Presley offers the sparkling jangle-pop gem he always seemed both capable of and reluctant to make. Through written piecemeal between 2021 and 2025 (a period in which Presley focused primarily on his painting practice), Orange is by far the tightest, most cohesive record he’s made, condensing six decades of Rickenbackered rock ’n’ roll history—from the Byrds to Big Star to the Brian Jonestown Massacre—without fuzzy obfuscation, tape-manipulated trickery, or subversive intent.
But for all its retro-gazing reference points, Orange is ultimately a portrait of Presley’s present. He ditches his usual parade of pink gorillas, lizards, and sticky fruitmen to deliver straight-from-the-heart dispatches from his road to recovery, cast against a lived-in backdrop of San Fran scenery. “Oh money gets me what I want/I just need enough/To medicate my thoughts,” he sings on the breezy opener “That’s Where the Money Goes,” a new-day-rising declaration that’s nonetheless haunted by the sins of yesterday. “I Came Close, Orange for Luck” whips by in a blur of Flying Nun strums, pausing just long enough to highlight Presley’s most paranoid thoughts (“I’m afraid to go outside/Afraid of food, and our water”).
The best power-pop thrives on the simmering tension between joyous jangle and sorrowful sentiment, and Presley imbues Orange’s songs with a palpable sense of shame and regret that makes even its most ebullient tracks feel heavy. “Reflections in a Shop Window on Polk” wafts in like Love cutting a C86 track, and its liberated, walking-on-air feel complements Presley’s declaration of “I’m better now”—at least until he delivers the bruising kicker: “Oh, what a lie.”
