If we believed everything Mark Wahlberg movies told us, trees would be out to kill us and former rock musicians reserve their post-rock days playing acoustic tracks on a bar stool in some quaint, remote American town full of truckers and people who wear jeans and old baseball caps.

For Los Angeles’ Mike Jensen, co-founder, co-writer and guitarist of the Orange County, CA heavy metal/punk/jazz band Mind Over Four, the Marky Mark teachings are flat out wrong.

Jensen, under the nickname Micheal Fordays, has released his first single of the year and set his sights on a new EP in early 2023. Teaming up with producer, composer and drummer Dave Klein (Agent Orange, The Ghastly Ones and The Bomboras), “Slowly Now” keeps one foot in mid-to-late 90s alt-rock and another in today’s lyrical awareness. The track bursts out of the gate and carries a post-punk undertone of reverb and slick chord changes which embody a pace we can’t get enough of. Balancing with Fordays vocals, the combination feels almost instantly something we’d pull out of a bin in the closet that stokes great memories, but new enough to balance it out. At three minutes, the song packs a serious punch ending in a guitar solo that will have you hitting repeat faster than Marky Mark can sample Loleatta Holloway.

As he puts it, “though I’ve written a few romantic tunes as a solo artist, I pretty much stick to deeper themes now. If you’re always in a mode where you’re trying to figure yourself out, you’ll have the opportunity to share a lot of wisdom, and that’s more interesting than songs about partying.” Departing the 80s-to-90s Mind Over Four heavy-handed era of when “she walked in the room/and proceeded to crawl on the floor,” Micheal Fordays is carrying on his sound and continuing to pave the path that may or may not include bar stools, truckers, and dirty baseball caps, that’s up to him.