#CulturePH - ALYSON's After Ours Is the OPM Album for Everyone Who's Ever Loved Past the Honeymoon Phase
You know that feeling when a song catches you off guard — not because it's new, but because it describes something you didn't know you needed a soundtrack for? That weird, quiet space after a relationship has moved past its golden, can't-stop-smiling early stage and settled into something more complicated, more honest, more real? Filipino city pop collective ALYSON just made an entire album out of that feeling, and it might be the most emotionally intelligent OPM release of the year.
After Ours, the band's sophomore record dropping May 22 via Offshore Music, isn't just a follow-up. It's a statement. If their debut Definitely Love! was the rush of falling — breathless, bright, barely contained — then After Ours is everything that comes next. The embers. The reckoning. The part where love gets heavier and, somehow, more worth keeping.
Vocalist and lyricist Pio Ligot puts it plainly: the album's title is a play on "after hours" — that late-night moment when the party's over, the music stops, and you're left alone with your thoughts and whatever remains of the feelings you started the night with. That's the emotional territory After Ours stakes out: yearning, temptation, the search for stability when the honeymoon has quietly packed up and left the building.
What makes this more than a breakup playlist dressed in retro production is the sheer intentionality behind every sonic decision. ALYSON spent nearly a year writing and rehearsing the material before they ever formally recorded a note. When they finally did, they chose to capture much of it live — full ensemble sections, minimal overdubs, performances that breathe and flex and resist the mechanical precision of a click track. Producer and drummer Marcus Mababangloob describes it as an old-school approach, a direct homage to how the records they love most were made. "It's an intentional aesthetic choice," he says, "not a compromise."
That philosophy runs deep through the album's DNA. ALYSON's musical vocabulary has always leaned heavily on Japanese city pop, '70s OPM, Motown, Philly soul, and Brazilian funk — influences that reward careful listening and tend to age beautifully. On After Ours, those reference points don't just color the sound; they shape its architecture. Orchestral arranger and trumpeter David Jorvina brings in horn and string arrangements that give the record a cinematic weight without losing its intimacy. And in what might be the record's most inspired decision, the album was mastered in Tokyo by Eiji Hirano — an engineer whose credits include the revered Japanese act Ryusenkei — lending After Ours a sonic depth and a direct lineage to the music that made ALYSON who they are.
The result is a record that feels genuinely earned. Tracks like "Ikaw Lagi," "Landi," "Bighani," and "Kung Sakaling Tanawin" showcase a band leaning into creative risk without losing the warmth that made people fall for them in the first place. A collaboration with Filipino artist Paprikka on "Talaga" channels the theatrical romance of vintage anime — city pop as drama, love as performance, in the best possible way.
For a working adult scrolling through a music app on a Monday evening, wondering why nothing seems to stick lately, After Ours might be exactly what you didn't know you were looking for. Not the soundtrack to falling in love, but the one for staying in it — through the uncertainty, the longing, the unglamorous and quietly profound work of choosing someone again after the fireworks have faded.
That's a harder album to make. It's also a more necessary one.
After Ours by ALYSON is out May 22, 2026, on all digital platforms via Offshore Music.
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