Brooklyn-based dream pop band Widowspeak have announced their fourth album, Expect the Best, and released a hazy, hypnotic first single called “Dog.” “She always knows when she’s good / I think she understood,” sings frontwoman and primary songwriter Molly Hamilton, regarding her pet’s simple life with something like envy.
According a band statement, Expect the Best was written while Hamilton was living Tacoma, Washington, near where she grew up, and the move home “was the catalyst for a record concerned with self-examination and the sense of dread that comes from feeling adrift.” Rather than a commentary on the music within, the album’s title is about “reconciling the desire to dwell with a need to ‘expect the best,’ even as the best seems unlikely.”
On “Dog,” Hamilton’s wistful vocals and Widowspeak’s grunge-tinted strain of shoegaze aptly evoke the sensation of adult drift. The song is “about the compulsion to move on from things and places, even people, when you’re not necessarily ready to,” Hamilton told NPR. “Sometimes, I get caught up in ‘the grass is always greener’ mentalities, or cling to an idea that ‘I’d be happy if…’ and then make a drastic change. Then, inevitably, I feel restless a few months later and it starts again.
“It also addresses how I look at social media. I think it will help me feel connected to people I used to see more, but I end up feeling lonelier, like I’m missing out on a sense of contentedness that comes with staying put or at least committing to a particular direction. So it’s not literally about my dog so much as the way a dog might think about its home—not overthinking the next move, geographic or mental.”
Expect the Best is out August 25 from Captured Tracks. It follows Widowspeak’s 2015 album All Yours. Watch the Vaseline-lensed new video for “Dog” (directed by Otium) and see the album artwork, full track list, and tour dates below.
