Photo Credit: Max Rubin
Chicago’s Sleepwalk have shared their new single, 'Jan 22', the latest preview of their forthcoming album View From The Outside due 13th November via MNRK Heavy.
An anthemic, serene dream-pop number, ‘Jan 22’ pairs enveloping vocal melodies with shimmering guitars and sees the four-piece further refine their distinctive blend of shoegaze, ’90s alt rock and post-hardcore.
"'Jan 22’ is a love letter to winter time in the city, as well as a general celebration of life," Ryan Davis (vocals/guitar) explains. "It's easy to focus on the bad things and miss the beauty.”
Watch the video for 'Jan 22' here: https://youtu.be/Vp-cXnFuiQY
Presave View From The Outside here: http://sleepwalk.ffm.to/viewfromtheoutside
Lead single ‘Sandbox’, delivered last month, was an appropriate introduction to View From The Outside, an album that exists somewhere between the dream state and the waking world, where chiming guitars, battered rhythms and wistful melodies collide with the uncomfortable business of being alive right now. Now, with follow-up ‘Jan 22’, that tension gives way to something warmer, a song about finding small pockets of beauty in the middle of winter and remembering to actually notice them.
Sleepwalk have always occupied the space between things. Shoegaze without the shoegaze clichés. Post-hardcore without the obligatory aggression. Alternative rock with enough strange corners to keep it from settling comfortably into nostalgia. On View From The Outside, those contradictions become the point.
The band's fourth full-length finds them moving decisively beyond the nu-gaze beginnings of their earlier work, expanding their palette without losing the hooks, heaviness or emotional directness that brought listeners to them in the first place. There are moments of towering guitar noise and bruising post-hardcore; dreamy passages that feel almost weightless; flashes of ’90s alternative rock; and, unexpectedly, even trip-hop.
“We wanted to explore some sub-genres that weren’t explored in the same way before,” says guitarist Tyler Gargula. “There’s dreamy things that weren’t as intricate; more rocky things that are now very clearly rock focused; and even trip-hop on the album’s closing track.”
The result is an album of dramatic shifts and subtle moods, weathered without being sentimental, melancholy without becoming miserable and adventurous without forgetting how to write a great song.
There is a distinctly Chicagoan DNA running through it, too. The album was recorded over twelve days at Earth Analog in Tolono, Illinois, the studio of Hum guitarist and vocalist Matt Talbot, an especially fitting setting given Hum's influence on Sleepwalk's sound. Once again, the band worked with producer Zac Montez (Whirr, Cloakroom), whose fascination with electronic music brings another dimension to Sleepwalk's already densely layered sound.
Formed in 2015, Sleepwalk built their reputation by seamlessly combining the visceral and cerebral. Lush, fuzzy guitars and reflective vocals, propelled by hardcore-inflected rhythms, saw the band draw comparisons to Hum, Failure, Quicksand and fellow Chicago legends The Smashing Pumpkins, while their live shows alongside Glassjaw, Thursday and Nothing introduced their strange, heavy little world to an increasingly devoted audience.
Now, with MNRK Music Group behind them, Sleepwalk are entering their next chapter. View From The Outside is heavier. Stranger. More considered. More ambitious. But at its centre remains the same idea that has always made Sleepwalk compelling, heavy music for the lighthearted, made by people trying to find something beautiful while everything around them gets progressively weirder.
And sometimes, the best place to do that is from the outside.
Sleepwalk are:
Ryan Davis - Vocals/Guitar
Tyler Gargula - Guitar/Vocals
Victorino Ordonez - Bass
Marcus Johnson - Drums
Sleepwalk online:
