Tanager Premiere New Single "Ways"

Ypsi quartet Tanager are back with a new single from their upcoming album,

Tanager will release their new album Hz Donut before the end of the year

What I've always dug about Tanager, displayed effectively here with "Ways," is how smooth and sleek everything can sound and feel even while still seeping in so much ambient haze, fiery fuzz, and trippy delay effects. This conjures such a sweet middle-ground between My Bloody Valentine, Yo La Tengo, and Broken Social Scene, produced in such a way where the guitars suggest velocity but also evoke a cradling cloudy tone and timbre.



The lead vocals are doubled, even tripled at points, synced just fractions of a second off of each other in a warm and woozy harmonization and further fogged by just a bit of echo and delay. Am I being too technical in the breakdown? Maybe it's those drums; just as the verse is ascending in a swirl toward the chorus, it has this choppily propulsive art-punk urgency, but just like so many of the other tender musical tides in this song, each phrase segues into the next section's new time signature with grace...

Yes, grace, but still enough grit from some glosses of reverb to let this fit not just in the indie-pop category, but also the noise-pop category... But why get hung up on categories? You're listening to it right now, and you can feel how it those sprinting drums pull you forward with the churning guitars, like running your way up a neon green hill at the ever-dreamy twilight time of day while those vocals spool and flutter over you like fireflies until you reach that chorus and everything reshuffles into a more downhill cartwheel where ambient synth sounds start swelling in to augment the sweetness of those guitars... And that vocal hook that threads the chorus together is going to be stuck in my head all week.

Tanager is Eleanor Daftuar on lead vocals/keys and guitar, with Rishi Daftuar on guitar/, Scott Kendall on bass, and Mary Fraser on drums. They released another single earlier in the year, and it will join this one on a forthcoming album that they hope to release before the snow falls. It was recorded/mixed by Rishi and produced by Eleanor & Rishi months back. Things have been held up as Rishi recovers from a severe leg fracture, but they hope to still have things on track to release this album soon. It's called Hz Donut.