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Jacob Kulick has been learning to let go. It’s a theme on Nostalgia Is a Thing of the Past, the Nashville-based singer, songwriter and producer’s new album. Though Jacob has released albums before, this one feels like a fresh start, which brings us back to the idea of letting go.

Jacob pared back the big rock sound of his earlier work, shed the impulse to play all the songs himself and even dropped KULICK, the persona he had adopted during his stint on a major label. Comprising eight songs, Nostalgia Is a Thing of the Past is his first album as Jacob Kulick in nearly a decade.

“KULICK was me anyway, but the Jacob Kulick project, this is what I write in my bedroom,” he says. “It feels so much more vulnerable because it’s not hidden behind all this production.” Indeed, these songs emphasize Jacob’s mesmerizing hooks and forthright lyrics exploring the human condition. He strikes a balance between urgent and wistful on “Motel 6,” where finger-picked acoustic guitar blends with subtly cascading keyboards. Soulful electric guitar powers “Same Way to Me,” as Jacob reflects on his life and how, in spite of it all, some things haven’t changed. He considers an eternal question on “Running in the Cemetery” before exchanging the hereafter for the here and now, accompanied by a swift beat and tendrils of guitar.

“All these songs feel like something I would have wanted someone to hear when I was first starting out. I wanted to reconnect to that,” says Jacob, who recently moved to Nashville, where he also works as a producer and audio engineer.

He started writing songs at 13 while living in West Penn Township, Pa., outside Allentown. Born with sensorineural hearing loss in both ears, making music was a way for Jacob to process bullying from his peers, along with the general angst of being 13. As he got older, songwriting helped Jacob make sense of the world around him, or at least his place in it.

“I’ve always questioned why we’re here and what’s the point of it, and that has remained consistent for most of my music career, especially with the new record,” says Jacob, who wears custom hearing aids. After college, a mutual acquaintance connected him with an executive at RCA Records, which eventually led to a record deal. The label had a notion of what his music should sound like, and while it didn’t always match Jacob’s vision, he was willing to play the game.

“I was signed to a major label, so I was going to make songs that a major label would push,” he says. “I justified it to myself, but if I had been making the music I wanted to make, it would have sounded like Nostalgia Is a Thing of the Past.”

Having established himself as KULICK with an EP and handful of singles for RCA, it took a minute for the singer to shift his creative focus after switching to the indie label Enci Records for the

KULICK albums Yelling in a Quiet Neighborhood in 2020 and Everyone I Know Will Die in 2022. “I was still kind of hanging on to the RCA image, so this record was me letting go of everything about that and tuning into what I want to do,” Jacob says. “The more I did that, the more I realized people were supporting me doing it.”