The Fat Angel Sings

Much of Widowspeak’s forthcoming album, “Expect The Best”, was written after singer Molly Hamilton returned to the town of her youth, Tacoma, Washington. It’s perhaps fitting then that it a record that seems to deal heavily in self-examination and exploring the feeling of being adrift in a rudderless world.

On their newest album for Brooklyn record label Captured Tracks, Widowspeak use familiar aesthetics as a narrative device, a purposeful nostalgic backdrop for songs.  Sonically, they exist somewhere in the overlap between somber indie rock, dream pop, slow-core and their own invented genre, “cowboy grunge.” At the heart of the band, there is a palpable duality, a push and pull between the delicate and the deliberate: the contrast of lead singer-songwriter Molly Hamilton with her strikingly beautiful  voice and poignant melodies with the terrestrial reality of being a four-piece rock band. These songs sound like the dark bars and rock clubs they were imagined for just as much as the bedrooms where they were written. “Expect the Best”  sees Widowspeak finding their greatest balance between opposing forces: darkness and light, quiet and loud, tension and calm.

Expect The Best, is the band’s first album recorded as a four piece, due out next week, and ahead of that release, Widowspeak have shared the stunning new single, The Dream. Many of the hallmarks of earlier recordings, the dusty twanging lead guitar lines and Molly Hamilton’s world-weary vocals, remain, but Widowspeak sound fuller and more ambitious than ever. Cinematic strings soar into The Dream, creating a perfect backdrop to the beautiful vocal delivery, as Molly seems to question her life choices, repeating the line, “isn’t that the dream?”, as if trying to convince herself as much as anyone else. The album title might tell us to expect the best, and listening to a track as good as The Dream, how could you expect anything else?

Expect The Best is out August 25th on Captured Tracks Records.

Widowspeak fuses lightness and darkness like few others: The group’s sound may conjure the effervescence of dream-pop, but a gloomy, anxious undercurrent anticipates nightmares at any given moment. On each successive album, bandleader Molly Hamilton adds a few more layers to an atmospheric, slow-burning sound that conjures deep melancholy, even as it indulges in the lilting majesty of shoegazing rock. Widowspeak’s members describe at least one element of their approach as “cowboy grunge,” and that’s strangely apt.

“Dog,” the first single from the band’s new third album, Expect The Best, captures Widowspeak’s distinct mix perfectly, while speaking to larger internal conflicts. Hamilton writes that the song is “about the compulsion to move on from things and places, even people, when you’re not necessarily ready to. 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,” she adds. “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 comes out August 25th via Captured Tracks.