Baltimore band Wildhoney has shared “Laura,” their first song from the unreleased EP, Your Face Sideways. The EP will mark their second ever album, which will presumably be released within a year of their debut album Sleep Through It. The album will be released via Topshelf Records and the track list can be seen here.
With a dreamy air to it, Lauren Shusterich’s wispy voice almost fades into the background of the chiming guitar melody. The track picks up some more steam as the reverbed guitar riffs become increasingly visceral and heavy towards the end of the song. The group’s tumblr addresses the difficulty of assigning a genre to its music that has been largely been identified as “shoe gaze” :
Wildhoney are a pop band through and through. While some have thrown around words like ‘dreamy’ and ‘hazy’ to describe their brand of guitar pop, there’s something deeper going on that can’t be summed up in an easy blog tag.
Stereogum, who premiered the track, describes it as “sweetly depressing,” like the “summer slipping away into fall.” However, the harmony’s buoyancy doesn’t seem to be weighed down by melancholia. Instead, the soft voice, strong percussion, and uppity guitar melodies simply balance each other out, in a way that is not necessarily optimistic, but at least accepting of the chill to come. Listen to the song here.
