I

I is the self-record, but not in a lonely way. Scoobert’s own Bandcamp note states the thesis plainly: the album is called “I,” but the lyrics keep using “u” — “u are why I’m me.” After MÖB opened the loop with body, memory, illness, anxiety, and self-story, I turns toward the self as something formed through movement, love, place, family, friends, nature, and return.

Finding $D is the lab notebook. Swami’s is the lore dump. Dragon Ball $d is the narrative hip-hopera. Masks and Monsters is the pandemic record. Little Hug is the small recovery object. Big Hug is the accessible thesis. KŌAN is the four-part paradox / international expansion. Moonlight Beach is the place-record, radio record, and live-body record. MÖB is the first Möbius turn: body, memory, anxiety, survival, loop-form. I is the second: relational selfhood, movement, love, nature, craft, and “u.” US is the third turn, in progress. MÖBIUS is the planned completing turn.

Bandcamp I dropped June 14, 2024 ($9.99 or more, 24-bit/44.1kHz). Thirteen tracks, about thirty-seven minutes, on Spotify and Apple Music, ℗ 2024 Beformer. Illustration and design by Grizzard Graphics; mastering by Riley Knapp. All songs written by Luke Francis Walton (BMI).

This is also the first clearly vinyl-forward Scoobert record in the public trail. Bandcamp lists a full multicolor 12-inch vinyl limited run with extensive liner notes, and New Cosmos Records lists two variants: 300 “daydreaming” multicolor splatter copies and 25 “golden state of mind” handmade beach-pattern copies using sand and beer labels Scoobert chose to represent the album’s inspiration.

The production note is unusually important. Scoobert intended the album as a soundtrack for travel — coastal trains, cars, robot cars — and programmed grooves on California trains, Shinkansen rides in Japan, and airplanes, so movement is baked into the music rather than only described by it. He wrote the record over about eight months, beginning in the Grand Tetons, then moving through the Sierra Nevada and Mount Whitney, with lyrics captured as voice notes on long hikes. Recorded at Micasa Studios (San Diego) and on the Tōkaidō, San’yō, and Tōhoku Shinkansen, the Pacific Surfliner, a Boeing 787 over the Pacific, and several other stops listed in the full liner notes.

That gives I a different center from MÖB. MÖB is looped, anxious, historical, memory-sick. I still carries doubt and loss, but the answer is motion: train, car, hike, island, coast, sky, water, Japan, home. It is not “I” as ego. It is “I” as a moving coordinate.

The studio step is also major. Scoobert says he finally got out of the bedroom for the first time since 2018, recording in a new studio/converted room, playing drums again, and building a more coherent LP palette around consistent room sound, reverbs, reversed sounds, and a “lofi meets hifi” third-room idea — virtual Sound City and Hitsville reverb blended with a real treated room. The old bedroom-pop DNA remains, but the self-production is now more deliberate and album-minded.

Collaborators sharpen the “everything sings” idea. Lou Roy on background vocals (tracks 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 13); Nicole McCabe on bass clarinet (4, 10, 12, 13); Bubby Lewis on bass (5, 12, 13). Scoobert handles recording, mixing, arranging, production, vocals, instruments, and field recording.

The attention trail is quieter than Moonlight Beach’s Paris/Munich radio moment, but not invisible. Nagamag on time with u called it catchy, harmonic, and joyful — bedroom/lo-fi pop, indie pop, dream pop. That fits the album’s public face: less “look how weird this mythology is,” more sweet, melodic, coastal, and easy to enter.

The meta-album context matters. On Love Music More, Scoobert says I is the second released part of the planned four-album MÖBIUS series after MÖB, with US (third turn, now in progress as chapter EPs) and MÖBIUS (completing turn) still to come. He frames the whole intended arc as a “super-album” or “meta-album,” partly as a reaction against single supremacy in streaming culture.

Big Hug was the attention hinge. Moonlight Beach was the geography and touring hinge. MÖB was the architecture hinge. I is the craft-and-self hinge: the Scoobert universe becoming clearer, warmer, and more classically album-shaped without losing the weird little engine that made it Scoobert. The “I” here is not isolated individualism. It is the self after the loop has learned what sustains it. What comes next is US, in progress.