Twenty-one years is a long time to sit with a title. “Almost Here” landed in 2005 and made William Beckett and The Academy Is… the kind of band whose name still comes up whenever someone starts a sentence with “for me, that record was the one.” For a lot of people in a certain age bracket, it genuinely was. And now there is “Almost There,” released March 27, deliberately named as a companion piece, and it has the decency to not pretend those twenty-one years did not happen.

That is the thing that saves this album. Reunion records live or die on whether the band is willing to account for time, and The Academy Is… is willing. Beckett has said the record is about “who they thought they would be twenty years later,” and that description lands on the music itself. The album does not sound like a band trying to recreate what made them. It sounds like a band trying to figure out what they are now, using the language they built back then.

Producer Snow Ellet gives “Almost There” a clarity that “Almost Here” did not always have. The guitars are cleaner. The arrangements breathe. There is room for the songs to exist as songs rather than being pushed through the machinery of early-2000s alt-pop compression. “2005” is the most obvious piece of self-reference on the record, but it earns its nostalgia by embedding it in something that feels genuinely forward-looking, shimmering synths sitting underneath an insistent rhythm that would not have existed in the version of this band that originally wrote about teenage summers.

“Miracle” is the kind of direct, unflinching vocal performance that Beckett has always been capable of and has not always chosen to lean into. Here he leans in. The song balances driving guitars with a reflective melody and does not resolve neatly, which is correct. The things being reflected on do not resolve neatly either.

“L Train” is the record’s most immediately pleasurable moment, airy and slightly nervous, like a song about a night out in Chicago written by someone who now views nights out in Chicago from a particular remove. “Snow Days” sits at the back half of the record and is the one that will stick. It sounds, as has been accurately described elsewhere, like a phone call between Beckett and guitarist Mike Carden. Two people catching up across distance, literal or emotional, and trying to figure out what the years between then and now actually amounted to.

The album is eleven tracks and does not overstay. Every song knows what it is trying to do. The production does not bury the band in effects trying to prove they have grown up, and it does not strip everything down in a bid for stripped-back authenticity either. It exists in the middle, which is where people actually live after twenty years.

This is the best-case version of what a record like this can be. It does not erase “Almost Here” or compete with it. It answers it. The conversation it starts with the first record is the kind of conversation that only becomes possible with time. The Academy Is… has had the time, and they used it.