salvia palth is back.

If you’ve had your ear to the ground, perhaps this isn’t the surprise of the year: He’s acknowledged that there’s something in the works on his comparatively quiet X profile and in the loose couple of interviews he’s done in the last few years. Despite many a YouTube investigator’s sense that Daniel Johann Lines and his long-dormant salvia palth project are lost to history, Lines has maintained one foot in the public realm with sparse releases under his given name and an electronic-leaning project called Adore, 1996. He recently collated his output on a minimalist, user-friendly web page. Now, Lines revives salvia palth to release a new album, last chance to see, 11 years after releasing his cult classic debut, melanchole.

Most listeners familiar with Lines’ work are only familiar with melanchole, his attempt at Teen Suicide-style bedroom pop that he crafted with found equipment at 15 years old. At the time of its 10-year anniversary, the salvia palth Spotify page boasted about 4 million monthly listeners, all from melanchole or its 2016 remaster; a year later, that figure is over 7 million.

“melanchole was the maximum of my abilities back then,” Lines explains. “There was a specific way of recording in melanchole that was just nonsense, which is why it’s the way that it is. The fundamental rules of mixing were not apparent or followed at all.”

The murky, lo-fi nature of melanchole was only partially a stylistic choice. Lines is more than willing to state that he was both short on equipment and knowledge at the time. For melanchole, at least, that didn’t matter: it’s become a centerpiece in people’s memory of lo-fi bedroom pop, a texture-laden genre associated with disparate figures like Teen Suicide, bulldog eyes, and Foxes In Fiction, among many others.

In the intervening years, Lines focused on improving his DIY practice. He intently studied music production in university and moved to Wellington, where he continues to amass new home studio gear via Facebook Marketplace. While he continued to release projects in college, he mostly focused on improving his skills, leading to a long dry spell with just a handful of compilation submissions as he perfected his new album in young adulthood.

“I’m a DIY musician first and a lo-fi musician second. I want to teach myself how to do this and do it myself, rather than nail a sound I’m trying to achieve. That’s got its negatives and its positives; for a long time, I had no sound,” Lines says.

After seven years of writing, recording, and re-recording at his own pace, plus two-years-and-change planning the release process while getting acquainted with the industry, last chance to see introduces a sound that Lines hopes to stick with for salvia palth. Where melanchole is heavily indebted to Teen Suicide and Winter, the unfinished album he released under his own name in 2016, is a descendant of Red House Painters, Lines sought a more varied palette for last chance to see, blending his love of classic pop, Jai Paul, Roger Troutman, the experimental side of Beck, and more across a diverse spread of songs. They all sound connected through Lines’ distinctive vocals, masterfully recorded at home, and hooky songwriting that shows a dedication to evolving his craft that recalls Alex G.

“There’s so much referential music,” Lines recognizes. “Pavement type stuff, shoegaze worship. That’s totally cool, but of all that stuff, I tend to prefer the originals. I’m not necessarily a shoegaze fan; I’m a My Bloody Valentine fan. I’m a Slowdive fan. I like the really specific sound that Loveless or Souvlaki had. I don’t want to hear anything that directly calls back to that; I want to hear the idiosyncratic blend of all the greats’ influences. That’s what Shields was doing, pulling together really different things, and I want to do that myself.”

last chance to see plays with a wealth of styles: “something i had said” is a breakbeat-laden, hazy post-punk moment; “stabbed in the small of the back” is folksy with a bossa nova foundation; and “still i struggle” welds dub, a hip-hop beat, and folk into a memorable, clear-as-day song about continuing to feel awkward over a decade after the peak of adolescent woes. Every song on last chance to see touches on some kind of emotional conundrum that carries over from adolescence into adulthood, speaking directly to the audience that has stood by melanchole for so many years.

“These are kind of basic social things to me that people find it hard to understand and express,” Lines elaborates. “That’s a primary reason why people listen to my music; they have something they find hard to understand and they see that someone has expressed that sentiment before. They identify with it on that level. I want these lyrics to be kind of propagandist: people can listen to these and gain some kind of pseudo-philosophical view of how they could carry themselves, if they’d like to.”

As someone who’s no stranger to wallowing in despair, Lines has a new perspective that he hopes to make clear to melanchole devotees, especially young ones, who are figuring out their paths to emotional wellness: “Many of our issues trace back to social ills, but there are a lot of things we have to take responsibility for. We have to take responsibility for how we interact with others, talk to people, et cetera. It can be hard to put that in perspective in the throes of depression, but we can think about our own involvement in social dynamics more.” By no means is it a “bootstraps” message, but a more sober, adult view: that people will be challenging, and emotions will complicate everything. That society’s present structures exacerbate those feelings, but we all have some role to play in our well-being and we owe it to ourselves, and our peers, to show up for that role.

For such a heady, didactic message, last chance to see still manages to accomplish a lot musically while reflecting on the greater existential concerns that weigh on Lines today. The title refers to the 1989 BBC radio documentary and book by Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardine cataloging near-extinction species across the globe and reflecting on anthropogenically accelerating extinctions. In a place like his home New Zealand, an island country with magnificent biodiversity, Lines has watched changes in conservation policy and bird habitat throw his communities into a fit; Lines presently laments the country’s rightward turn and their embrace of mining, an industry that historically stops in New Zealand for brief periods and leaves without sufficient remediation because the yields will always be stronger in neighboring Australia. As Lines watches Wellington change around him, he refines his songwriting and his practice to reflect the world he hopes to build in a city where the music industry is also, in his experience, narrow and desiccated.

Beyond sharing more positive, uplifting messages than on melanchole, Lines intends for last chance to see to serve as a template for other DIY musicians. “I am sending out an instruction manual because I think this is imitable,” Lines notes. “I know people have been inspired to create [after listening to my music], and I wanted to create an instruction manual on how to do so in a grander scale than melanchole. This is what happens when you buckle down and don’t pay attention to the false pressures of the industry.”

As for the surprise drop, Lines’ reason is simple: he doesn’t like press cycles. As a practitioner of indie rock, in particular, Lines resents long rollouts. “I’m trying to avoid recreating patterns of behavior that I see in music that I don’t understand why anyone would even do it,” he says. “These insane rollouts with lots and lots of videos and lots and lots of attention being put on a bunch of different things — you’re being pulled in all kinds of ways. They want you to watch this, then this, then this. I’m not a pop musician, I don’t really want to engage in any marketing tactics. Just as few as I can. That’s always how I’ve wanted to do it. When I see independent musicians trying to recreate these marketing campaigns, it blows my mind. I can’t wrap my head around it. I just want to hear the music.”

Lines acknowledges that he’s in a unique situation: With one album that is growing exponentially more viral under his belt, he has an audience and some income that keep him relevant and afloat. Lines is not seeking to make a huge splash with this album; he’s making a more modest aesthetic statement that he hopes his fans will try and, ultimately, support. As he’s worked on last chance to see, he’s maintained a label relationship with Danger Collective, who reached out to him in the years following melanchole’s modest but sturdy early niche success, and the freedom that the label has offered him plus the support they’ve offered with melanchole represses and related merchandise has helped subsidize Lines’ meticulous process.

That said, he is a firm believer that everyone has the potential to thrive doing it themselves, even without formal instruction, as long as they’re curious, willing to synthesize their interests, and patient with their gradual improvement process. last chance to see is the product of profound dedication not only to DIY but to an almost athletic level of self-improvement. To Lines, he did it all just to make sure he made an album he’d be willing to hear himself and enjoy.

With a new album out there, Lines has his sights on touring, a major departure from his longtime disinterest in live performance. He explains it’s practical: if he’s going to be a professional musician, he needs to share his craft in a live setting much like other DIY idols figured out how to. He recently saw longtime favorite Jai Paul in Melbourne and admires how he focuses on delivering a captivating vocal performance while his band, composed of friends and longtime collaborators like Fabiana Palladino, deliver an arrangement of Paul’s idiosyncratic instrumentals that fits the live experience. It will take a long time for Lines to figure out how to make that happen, but he’s anxious to try it out.

In the meantime, Lines has a longtime vision for himself as a producer, helping other rising musicians achieve the DIY vision with his equipment in an accessible, low-cost space. As Lines sees it, the studios in Wellington seem like little factories with nice microphones, nice preamps, and in-house mixing and mastering that is by-the-book, leaving little room for collaboration or experimentation, all while costing artists a fortune. That model may work for some, but there’s a middle class of boundary-pushing creatives who have little room in Wellington.

Wherever last chance to see takes Lines, it’s clear that he has no expectations and feels little pressure. He’s been grateful for the support for melanchole all these years, but as he’s grown up, he’s remade himself as an artist and plans to demonstrate that under this salvia palth moniker. In a world where viral success can lead young artists to exploitative contracts and dead-ends, Lines has maintained complete control of his project and his presence. It’s anomalous, but if last chance to see has proven anything, it’s that this deliberate approach can lead to an extraordinary creation. It’s a sustainable practice in an era of disposable talent.

last chance to see is out now on Danger Collective.