Guitarist/composer Jan Esbra presents his most personal work to date: a collection of five songs written during a period of transition, heartbreak, and self-discovery. The album’s title is a translation of a phrase used by Esbra’s father throughout his childhood, and the phrase becomes both mantra and mandate across the songs on the album, reminding you to continue onward even when the ground below you is changing.

Written largely from inside the turmoil that shaped it, Keep Moving Forward captures the immediacy of major life upheaval, charting Esbra’s experiences moving out of an eight-year relationship, losing a sense of home, navigating damaged friendships, and rebuilding a life and artist voice - often while literally couch-surfing and living out of bags. “All of this music was written from the weeds,” he says. “These songs were how I processed what was happening in real time.”

Esbra’s background as an instrumental composer and guitarist shaped by minimalism, math-rock, and explorative ensemble playing threads through the album. The songs unfold lush interlocking patterns built from shifting guitar figures, subtle rhythmic phasing, and collage-like form cuts, allowing space for Esbra and his band to interpret and build upon his compositional structures.

Keep Moving Forward is, at its core, an album about growing pains. The kinds that reshape you by exposing the misalignments between your internal compass and the externalities of how you are living. Although Jan Esbra writes his compositions with a certain literality - capturing snapshots of specific moments as they occurred - the emotional world he creates is expansive and reaches out to anyone who has felt lost or has had to rebuild themselves.

While the experiences are intensely personal, the music is not inward-facing, but reaches outward to anyone “going through it and needing encouragement” as Esbra puts it. It speaks to transformation, resilience, and the uncomfortable necessity to let the past stay in the past.

Keep Moving Forward was recorded and co-produced by Jacob Aviner (Porterfield), with performances by André Sacalxot (Fievel Is Glauque), Andrew Haug (On A Limb), Dave Strawn (Geordie Greep), and Daniel Rossi (Haley Heynderickx). It is a unique and personal chapter from Jan Esbra, marked by the honesty, boldness, and conviction to keep stepping into the unknown.