Where most Tonstartssbandht albums come together slowly over years, recorded on the fly whenever the White Bros. have a few spare moments on the road, Petunia was largely written and recorded in their home city of Orlando in 2020. Many of the tracks had been played live, but in extremely rough form (“skeletons of songs,” as Andy puts it), and hadn’t yet developed into any kind of mature stage. With plenty of time on their hands thanks to the lockdown, and no shows to play, Andy and Edwin decided to pack some flesh onto those skeletons and bring them to life on their own. Petunia is the first Tonstartssbandht album to be created in a sustained manner and in a consistent environment, written and recorded in a single place over a focused period of time.

As a result, Petunia feels like a unified aesthetic statement. Using little more than a 12-string guitar and a drum kit, Andy and Edwin weave together the gentle headiness of Laurel Canyon and the sweaty pacing of Cologne; like a gyroscope, its constant motion produces the illusion of stillness – and that stillness gives it a sense of intimacy and introspection, something that’s further illuminated by the new emphasis placed on the brothers’ vocals. Taking cues from The Zombies and the falsetto-feathered singing of ’70s funk and reggae, Andy and Edwin stitch their voices together so easily, and with such generosity, it’s virtually impossible to see the seams.

And it allows the quiet wisdom of the lyrics – what Andy self-deprecatingly calls “generic broad platitudes that I still think resonate when I say them” – to slip in almost unnoticed, delivering their emotional truths while preparing a feather bed for you to collapse into. “All roads will lead to the heart of town, when you’ve been running too long,” he sings in the album’s opening moments. “Being at peace only slows you down, but you’ve been running so long now.” In “Smilehenge,” he packs his bags, sweeps up the apartment, and says goodbye to an old life and an old love. “How will it feel when you turn out the light?” he wonders.

That same sense – of waiting in liminal spaces, of wondering what exists on the other side of uncertainty, shimmers through single “What Has Happened.” With an arrangement lightly influenced by Talk Talk and a shaky guitar sounding like a sonar, Andy and Edwin perch at the edge of the self and stare out. “Honestly,” Andy sings, his voice breaking, “What has happened to me?” Opener “Pass Away” expands upwards on the back of Edwin’s maracas and tapped percussion, and once they’re firmly in the air, they fly freely, Andy’s guitar asking the questions while Edwin’s drumming keeps them moving forward.

While the album was recorded at the brothers’ home studio in Orlando between April and August of 2020, it was mixed by Joseph Santarpia and Roberto Pagano at The Idiot Room in San Francisco – “our old Florida buddies who have great ears,” as Andy puts it. With those ears attuned to the recordings, Petunia is brighter, punchier, and more direct than its predecessor, the direct result of Santarpia and Pagano’s confidence in the performances the album captures. “They were just there to help paint in the mixing,” Andy says, but “they’re so good at bringing up levels, leveling everything really well.”