The ease with which “Nothing Feels Right” glides across your speakers is slyly disarming. The new single from Atlanta newcomers Sleepers Club wastes no time in making its presence felt, enveloping the listener in a warm haze of undulating shoegaze guitars. As an introduction, it’s not so much a tap on the shoulder as it is an arms-wide bear hug. The playing is lithe and loose—especially that loping backbeat—but the resulting tractor beam pull is both undeniable and yet strangely reassuring.

You could call it a summertime banger. More specifically, I think, it’s an end-of-summer anthem. Since her days leading Sydney Eloise and the Palms, Sydney Ward’s voice (and by extension, her music) has managed to engender a kind of shimmering, sun-drenched aura. And while that remains true for the most part in Sleepers Club, you can also hear autumn’s longer shadows beginning to intercede. As her vocals sashay over the cascading wall of guitars, you can’t help but feel an air of melancholy settling in. Yeah, you may be cruising with the radio blasting and the windows down, but you’re feeling far more pensive than carefree.

Alternating between sadness, nostalgia, and regret, “Nothing Feels Right” probes the quiet grief of having friendships dissolve and disappear. There’s a sense of loss, to be sure, but also a kind of reckoning. “Were we really ever connecting well?” she questions in one line. “Never meant to shut you out,” she confides in another. It’s clear there’s considerable blame to go around, but Ward is more interested in learning from than litigating the past.

“‘Nothing Feels Right’ is sort of a reflection of a time when I was examining my friendships,” she explains. “Things were feeling off, and in the end, a whole chapter kind of closed for a big friend group. I was sort of just watching it all unravel, knowing I had a hand in it, too. Maybe there’s a little guilt about that in this song, too. Growing up, and apart. It’s a little bittersweet, but it begs the question, if it’s all crumbling this fast, were we really ever connected in the first place? Was I just changing and growing at a different speed? It was a confusing time, but this song sort of looks at the early moments in that situation where I realized something was changing in the dynamic.”

Joining Ward on the project is producer and longtime collaborator Damon Moon (Bathe Alone, Lunar Vacation). The duo have been creating music together for over a decade, and their shared vision and cohesion really shine on these latest singles. Moon is certainly no stranger to conjuring lush, well-textured soundscapes, but there’s something about Sleepers Club that feels uniquely different from his other work.

Funny then, that the project almost never came to be, another casualty of pandemic isolation and it’s splintering of time. Recorded in 2020, the music was first and foremost a means of contending with the existential dread of being shut off from the world. But as time passed and their lives returned to some sense of normalcy, the recordings were shelved if not totally forgotten. Recently, however, Ward and Moon began to experience a similar feeling of unease, or as Ward describes it, a “familiar uncertain energy.” A desire to revisit the songs took hold, and as such, Sleepers Club was once again brought to life.

“In 2020 when all of these songs came to be, they came out of the anxiety that we all felt at the very beginning of the pandemic,” Ward reveals. “There was this terrible sense of not knowing, and of having no control. Writing and recording these songs was kind of our survival mode at the time. It feels like five years later there’s a really similar energy in the world, again. We’re back in uncharted territories. These songs have all been sitting on a hard drive for years, but it felt serendipitous when Damon and I realized we were both finding ourselves thinking about these songs a few months ago. It’s been a cathartic process to start releasing these—revisiting who we were five years ago, and feeling the same energy now that we did back then.”

Listen below.

Sleepers Club will perform on Fri., Sept. 5 at Star Bar for Mainline Music Fest. Also performing will be SMALL, Night Palace, TAYLOR ALXNDR, Savoy., and Posture Clinic. Doors open at 8 pm. Admission is $15. 21+ to enter.

More Info
Web: sleepers.club
Instagram: @sleepers.club
SoundCloud: @sleepers-club