A Brazilian Songwriter Turns Pandemic Isolation Into Five Tracks of Alternative and Progressive Rock
No Land to Return runs to five tracks and about 23 minutes. It was recorded at home in 2020, while the world was locked down. Alex Palheta finished No Land to Return two years later and released it on 22 April 2022. Based in Belém, Brazil, the songwriter made it about what the pandemic did to people. Its subjects are depression, isolation, the fight to get through and the hope for something better.
Alex Palheta’s No Land to Return is in the playlist below, its title track among the grunge and alternative rock this desk keeps in rotation. The songwriter’s coverage across our network lives on the Alex Palheta artist profile. The EP reached RockRevival.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Press play, then read on for the lockdown records it joins.
Lockdown Made the Home Studio the Room Where Records Like No Land to Return Took Shape
So start with the most famous lockdown record in rock. Paul McCartney recorded McCartney III in early 2020 at his own studio in Sussex, England, during the pandemic lockdown. He played almost every instrument on it, building each song up in layers. The album reached number one in the UK in December 2020. It was his first solo number one there in 31 years.
That is the template for the wave: one musician, one room, and the parts tracked one at a time. Alex Palheta tags No Land to Return with The Beatles on his own Bandcamp page. So the line from McCartney to this EP is one he draws himself.
Where Alex Palheta Fits, From a Home Recording in 2020 to a Finished EP in 2022
Like McCartney, Palheta built the EP mostly by himself. He played guitar, acoustic guitar and bass and produced the record. Ze Pedro Carvalho played the drums. Three more players filled in the rest. João Lima added organ, electric piano and synths to Brave and Freedom. David Bittencourt played piano, synths and pads on Stay Inside and co-produced it, and Cássia Nunes played piano on Red Roses. Rodrigo Jorge mixed and mastered the EP at Hey Ho Studios.
The running order tells the story. Brave opens at just over five minutes, and Freedom is the longest track. The title track sits in the middle. Stay Inside takes its name from the instruction of the time, and Red Roses closes the EP at three minutes. It was Palheta’s debut EP, released after two singles.
Two rock sites picked it up in 2022. Eat This Rock Blog listed the title track that June among four new songs to hear. It filed the song under alternative and stoner rock. In Brazil, Headbangers News described the EP as a portrait of the two pandemic years. Palheta is also a painter and illustrator, and the cover art is his own work.
Pink Floyd and Alice in Chains Sit Closest to No Land to Return Among the Bands Alex Palheta Names
Still, the wave is only half the picture. The other half is the rock catalogue behind the record. Alex Palheta tags No Land to Return with Pink Floyd, Alice in Chains, The Beatles, Oasis and The Who.
Pink Floyd made the definitive rock record about isolation. The Wall, released in November 1979, follows a rock star called Pink. Over a double album, he builds a psychological wall around himself. It topped the US charts for 15 weeks. No Land to Return works on a much smaller scale, but it tells the same kind of story from the inside. Headbangers News also heard one of its guitar solos as being in Pink Floyd’s tradition.
Alice in Chains show what an EP can carry. Jar of Flies came out in January 1994. It was the first EP ever to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. The band produced it themselves and wrote and recorded it in about a week in Seattle. Palheta also produced his own EP, but his took two years instead of one week. That is a fair measure of how long the pandemic years felt.
Start With Stay Inside, Then Play No Land to Return From Brave to Red Roses
So start with Stay Inside, the track named for the rule everyone lived by in 2020. Then go back to Brave and play the five songs in order. The EP is on Bandcamp, the home Palheta chose for it, as well as Spotify. It was made in a room at home during the worst of the pandemic, and it ends by looking for a way out.
RockRevival.News’s curator team: “Alex Palheta tracked a lockdown record at home and never let it turn bleak. No Land to Return faces a hard time head on, and its riffs still point towards hope.”
Stream No Land to Return on Bandcamp or Apple Music. Then follow Alex Palheta on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.
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