Tofusmell – All My Time

“You cannot plan anything. You can’t expect anything good or bad. Everything is just going to continue to be however it will be.” This is the way musician Rae Chen encapsulates his debut album as Tofusmell, All My Time. At times reserved and gracefully restrained, and other times overflowing and agitated, All My Time showcases Rae’s signature precision in vulnerable, clear-eyed songwriting, with a larger, lusher, and more fleshed-out scale of production than we’ve seen from him before. Chen poetically distills the uncomfortable complications of learning to release expectation from outcome, and in turn live contentedly in life’s constant, confusing uncertainty. It’s less an apathetic resignation than a hopeful insistence that impermanence, and the toiling mystery it brings, is it’s own kind of steady salve. Following the release of his 2023 EP Humor, Chen spent a few months intermittently touring with Leith Ross before daring to move away from his home