Singer, songwriter and sideman Mikal Cronin has spent the last few years creating music—just not his own. After his last solo album, MCIII, dropped in 2015, Cronin hit the road as part of garage-rock icon Ty Segall’s rotating circus of collaborators. But when it came to Cronin’s own brand of deceptively tense power-pop, he felt stuck. “Writer’s block is a tricky, nebulous thing for me,” says Cronin. “It feels like you’re going crazy when you can’t properly express yourself.” So he tried one of the oldest tricks in the songwriter’s book: He headed into the woods, renting a cabin in Idyllwild, a mountain town in Southern California. “[The] idea is a romantic one, but it’s hard to find the energy to follow through with it. But I felt a positive [vibe] in the woods,” he says. “It was easier to think when the only one making noise was me.” Finally, the songs came—with darker music to match Cronin’s typically introspective lyrics—but then, so did the flames. While sequestered away, an arsonist started a forest fire nearby in the hills. “It looked huge and got closer every minute,” he says. “The scariest part was getting my cat Ernie out from under the bed; he was the last thing to pack up [before] the fire department came up the hill to get everyone out.” The peace—and the fire—were exactly the spark Cronin needed. He recorded Seeker live, largely with his Ty Segall compatriots, creating a stormy, guitar-driven groove record—easily the rawest and most rocking of his career. Cronin compares his past work to the bright-music/heavy-lyrics dynamic of Pet Sounds, but the words and sounds of Seeker rage and rattle together. It’s Cronin’s Walden experiment manifested—he found exactly what he was seeking, right before the flames could take it all away.