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If, as the well-worn line goes, you can’t know where you’re going till you know where you’ve been, then Paper Rival absolutely know where they’re headed with their Photo Finish debut album, Dialog. Refining their trademark warm, Charles Atlas-lean sound into something altogether deeper, richer and more focused, Dialog also finds the Nashville quartet asking the sort of lyrical Big Questions about life, love and the point of it all that make great records timeless. As that album title indicates, this is every bit a dialog between a band and the world around it.

The strides they’ve made seem all the more impressive when you consider that Paper Rival – singer Jake Rolleston, guitarist/drummer Patrick Damphier, guitarist Brent Coleman and bassist Cody McCall – have only been a band for three years. Formed, under a short-lived different name, from the remnants of two other Nashville groups, Paper Rival didn’t take long to find their voice. Hitting the studio within weeks of securing their lineup, they nailed down a foundation that was as timeless (ask them about Bob Dylan and Bruce Cockburn sometime) as it was forward-thinking.

While that foundation is in place throughout Dialog, it’s the subtleties – the warmer production; the miles of open space; the upright bass (courtesy, no less, of longtime Johnny Cash sideman Dave Roe); the piano, fiddle and synth accents – that show how far Paper Rival have come in the studio. “We’re kind of obsessive about detail,” explains Damphier, who produced both Dialog and the band’s self-titled 2007 EP for Photo Finish. “I guess we’re control freaks, too, but I think that handling everything ourselves has also freed us to be a lot more comfortable and loose in the studio, and I really feel like that comes across in these new songs.”

Lyrically, Paper Rival have also extended their range on Dialog, drawing heavily from real life and pushing themselves out of old comfort zones in the process. The gorgeously sad-eyed, acoustic-guitar-driven “The Kettle Black,” for instance, takes its lyrics from actual WWII-era letters between Rolleston’s great-grandparents. (“It’s amazing how the problems they had back then transcend to our lives today,” he says.) The ethereal, angular “Keep Us In” takes a hard look at Tennessee’s backward views on same-sex marriage. And the spacious, organ-tinged “Bluebird” traces the effects of a horrific real-life murder on friendship, family and fate. “I think of the album as an open-ended conversation,” says Rolleston. “I’m going places that I don’t necessarily like to think about, but I’m doing it in the hopes that there are other people out there who’ve felt the same things and are also trying to deal with it.”

While they’ve already covered serious ground in reaching just those people – via high-profile gigs with artists such as Circa Survive, Manchester Orchestra and The Hush Sound, as well as repeat appearances at the annual Bamboozle festival – Paper Rival have made, without a hint of compromise, an album with the potential to connect on an even broader level. To borrow a theme from Dialog itself: We know where these guys have been, but we can’t wait to see where they’ll go next.

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