We think we make ourselves as teenagers, only to realise as we get older that it was the small world surrounding us in childhood that made us. For his seventh album with Okkervil River, frontman Will Sheff goes back to that small world: a village in New Hampshire in 1986, where his pre-adolescent self camped and played guitar, saw something in the woods that made him feel like a solid ghost, and began to understand he would shed even his best friends in the forward rush of life. Sheff is too smart a lyricist to succumb to simple nostalgia – "Show me my best memory, it's probably super crappy," he notes amid the watery loveliness of Pink-Slips – but he also understands its irrational appeal, that "constant panicked wishing for what's lost". He's not above plucking easy emotional strings with music that is slyly, vaguely reminiscent of songs he heard on the radio growing up. I catch whispers of Oliver's Army, Dexy's, Jesus and Mary Chain: my own youth rising to the surface, just as Sheff intends.