Adam Goldberg returns with When the Ships of My Dreams Return, his fourth album as the Goldberg Sisters and his most wide-ranging release to date. Expansive in sound and deeply inward in spirit, the record finds Goldberg leaning into instinct, accident, and patience, letting songs unfold naturally rather than forcing them into shape. The result feels tactile and intimate, music that carries the sense of a person alone in a room, following ideas wherever they decide to lead.

Best known to many for his work as an actor in films like Saving Private Ryan and Dazed & Confused, Goldberg has long treated music as a parallel creative language rather than a side project. Under the Goldberg Sisters name, he has carved out a space rooted in moody, multi-layered psych-pop, pulling inspiration from the melodic curiosity of the Kinks, the introspection of Mind Games-era Lennon, and the dreamlike drift of Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev.

When the Ships of My Dreams Return follows 2018’s Home: A Nice Place to Visit, a record completed during a major turning point in Goldberg’s life. Around that time, his first son had just turned one, and the way he approached creativity began to shift. Where earlier projects were often squeezed into narrow windows between acting jobs, those rigid timelines slowly fell away.

“In the past, I’d carve out time to make music before going off to do an acting job,” Goldberg explains. “There was a finite period of time in terms of the limitations I’d put on the recording process.”

As acting commitments increased and family life took on greater weight, music receded for a while. At moments, Goldberg even questioned whether he would return to it at all. But the pull never fully disappeared. “I’m doing it for myself, oftentimes just with myself,” he says. “It used to be that I couldn’t stop making music. It wasn’t really a choice.”

That sense of internal necessity quietly shapes When the Ships of My Dreams Return. Rather than chasing momentum or productivity, the album thrives on space and curiosity. Synths hum and shimmer, melodies drift in unexpected directions, and songs feel discovered rather than constructed. There’s a calm confidence to the way Goldberg allows the material to breathe, trusting that clarity will arrive in its own time.

The album stands as a snapshot of an artist reconnecting with a part of himself that never fully went away, only waited patiently to resurface. In doing so, Goldberg charts new creative territory, not by reinventing who he is, but by listening more closely to where his instincts are trying to take him next.