Time Spent Driving are veterans of the late ’90s and early 2000s Emo and Indie Rock scene, and they have announced their new full-length album, Lost Leaves, arriving August 21, 2026. The band has previewed the new record with the release of the double single “Weak Arm” / “December”.
The album’s arrival also marks another major chapter for Time Spent Driving, who will return to the stage for shows later this year.
The two songs making up the new double single offer “distinct but connected perspectives” on the personal shift at the heart of Lost Leaves.
On “Weak Arm,” singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Jon Cattivera “confronts the people and relationships that can quietly impede personal growth and the importance of being deliberate about the energy you allow into your life.”
Cattivera says:
‘Weak Arm’ is inspired by anyone in your life that’s holding you back from your dreams or slowing you down. Whether it’s a family member, a friend, or a business relationship, I firmly believe you create your own reality. I’ve seen this happen before my eyes as I’ve focused more and more on surrounding myself with people who have a positive outlook and an energetic aura that motivates change, increases momentum, and has a positive impact on your life. I never unfriend people or close them off, but I’ve found that not engaging as much with egotistical, negative people is worth its weight in gold.
“December,” meanwhile, holds a particularly important place in the story of Lost Leaves. The first song written for the album, the track was “inspired by a psychedelic experience in Big Sur that Cattivera credits with shifting his perspective and setting him on a new path.”
Cattivera explains:
‘December’ was the first song written for the album. It’s about an early psychedelic experience down in Big Sur a couple years ago in December, which is also my birthday. My wife likes to remind me that I’m a Capricorn with a Pisces rising. She’s big into that stuff, and it turns out it’s pretty damn accurate.
It was an amazing and transcendent experience that created an even stronger connection and influenced the rest of my life. It set me on a new path out of the darkness and into an entirely new outlook and stage of my life. It’s the kind of experience that makes you want to revisit it, but it’s never the same thing twice.
Much of Lost Leaves was already written before the band’s previous album came out. The bulk of the material emerged during an concentrated creative stretch between October 2022 and January 2023. From there, their mission was to “bring the songs together as a band, refine them collectively, and capture the material while its emotional weight was still immediate.”
Produced by Olav Tabatabai and Jon Cattivera, Lost Leaves was recorded at Compound Recordings in Santa Cruz, California between May 2023 and November 2024, with additional sounds, odds and ends recorded at Cattivera’s Breathing Trees home studio in Boulder Creek, California. Tabatabai also engineered and mixed the album at Noise Eater, with mastering handled by Dan Coutant at Sun Room Audio.
