Is anyone else feeling brain dead this week? Maybe it’s the existential dread from the looming Supreme Court decision, the brutal heat creeping in, or some other celestial fuckery, but I’ve been having a hard time focusing on anything. Mostly I find that one moment blurs into another, one sentence bleeds into the next, and time marches forward. During these days that pass like haunting daydreams, there’s no better balm than Bathe Alone’s hypnotic dream pop. The group’s otherworldly, lo-fi songs create emotional worlds with gripping narratives.
Their latest single “Waste It” is a bittersweet track that describes a disintegrating friendship. On it, vocalist and guitarist Bailey Crone asks, “Am I your friend? / Or a movie you’re seeing again?” It’s a touching rendering of that moment where a “friend” reveals their true colors. “Waste It” is lifted skyward by a bubbling synth flute motif that undulates between Crone’s whisper-sweet vocals.
The lyric video features sunset vistas as a car descends from the top of Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “The whole record is pretty nostalgic to me,” Crone reveals. “It felt fitting to capture the same view a child would have while looking out the car window. The woman in the artwork for ‘Waste It’ is my great-grandmother. That photo was taken in the seventies in the front yard of her house down the street from where the lyric video starts.”
Watch/listen above.
Bathe Alone’s forthcoming album, Fall With the Lights Down, is due out later this year via the Record Machine.
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