On This Track: Weekend Listening #12
Five new releases about attachment, change, uncertainty and the messy space in between.
Some songs are about knowing exactly where you stand. Others are much more interested in what happens when you don't. This week's On This Track: Weekend Listening 12 moves through that uncertainty in very different ways. Ra Ra Viper's new album "Ra Ra" captures the feeling of moving forward while trying to hold onto the people and places that shaped you, while personalheartbreaker and Some Days Are Darker get uncomfortably close to the line between desire and fixation. SUNTWIST look at the uncertainty that comes when one stage of life ends and everyone starts moving in different directions. Cover Zero takes a different route, turning Hitchcock's innocent man on the run into a fuzzed-out rock story. Across these five releases, there is a lot of movement - between people, places, identities and the things we thought we could hold onto.
Ra Ra Viper – ”Ra Ra”
There is something about "Ra Ra" that makes the idea of growing up feel less like a personal journey and more like something that happens to a whole group of people at once. Ra Ra Viper are a five-piece from Fremantle who built the band around loud guitars, live shows and close friendship, and that history matters when you listen to their second album. There is plenty of energy here, but underneath the surf-rock drive is a feeling of movement - people changing, places changing, and the realization that staying close to someone does not always mean staying in the same place. “Ramona, Again”, one of the singles from the record, carries some of that tension particularly well. The guitars keep the song moving while the subject matter gives it a more reflective edge. Across "Ra Ra", that contrast between momentum and uncertainty is what caught my attention. The band have already moved from their local scene in Fremantle to festival stages and a North American tour, so the album arrives at an interesting point in their story. It is about forward movement, but not necessarily about having everything figured out. Sometimes a band grows because its members grow, and sometimes that means asking what happens to the friendships and places that helped you become who you are in the first place.
🎧 Stream “Ra Ra” by Ra Ra Viper on Apple Music
personalheartbreaker - “Sorry Eyed”
“Sorry Eyed” is much less interested in the quiet side of attachment. personalheartbreaker's latest single starts with nostalgic synths and ambient textures before gradually getting heavier, with distorted guitars, huge reverb and airy vocals pushing the song into a darker place. The track is described as an “ultimate crash-out song” and that feels pretty accurate. What makes it interesting is that the song does not simply divide a relationship into victim and villain. It sits inside the messier territory of emotional dependence, obsession, guilt and wanting something even when you know it may not be good for you. That ambiguity feels particularly relevant to the way relationships are often lived and understood now, especially when so much of our emotional life can happen through screens, messages and fragments of information. personalheartbreaker's wider aesthetic - darkwave, witch house, shoegaze, post-punk, digital horror - fits that feeling well. There is something cold and futuristic about the production, but the emotions underneath it are painfully recognizable. “Sorry Eyed” asks where devotion ends and self-destruction begins, without pretending there is always an obvious answer.
🎧 Stream “Sorry Eyed” by personalheartbreaker on Apple Music
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Some Days Are Darker - “Memorize You”
Some Days Are Darker's “Memorize You” takes a similar question and pushes it even further. The song begins with a restless pulse and a dark, almost feverish atmosphere before gradually becoming more expansive. At its center is a line about wanting to remember someone's freckles, scars, eyes and heartbeat. On paper, that sounds romantic. In the context of the song, it starts to feel slightly unsettling. That is exactly what makes it work. The track keeps moving between intimacy and intensity until it becomes difficult to tell whether the narrator is expressing deep affection or crossing into fixation. The New York trio draw from goth, synth-driven alternative rock and noir cinema, and you can hear that influence in the dramatic way the song builds. It feels less like a straightforward love song and more like a scene in a film where you already suspect something is going to go wrong. "Black Box Warning", the forthcoming album, is built around desire and its consequences and “Memorize You” seems to understand something that pop culture often gets wrong about obsession: intense feelings do not automatically make a relationship healthy. Sometimes the most romantic-looking language can also reveal how little distance someone has left between loving another person and wanting to possess them.
🎧 Stream “Memorize You” by Some Days Are Darker on Apple Music
SUNTWIST - ”Matchbox”
SUNTWIST's debut EP "Matchbox" moves away from romantic obsession and into a different kind of uncertainty: what happens when the life you thought you were building suddenly starts changing? The Phoenix band wrote these five songs around the end of college, when members were preparing to move for jobs and realizing that the version of their lives they had known together was coming to an end. The title comes from that feeling. One by one, “a match would go out”, until they were left wondering when the last one would burn. There is a lot of nostalgia in the music - dreamy guitars, bright indie rock and hints of bands like The Strokes and Tame Impala - but the songs are not simply looking backward. “Stay High (Chasing Ghosts)” deals with the pressure to keep pushing yourself, “Winded in the Moonlight” looks both toward the past and whatever comes next, while “Why Mind It” captures the exhaustion of always having to move forward. “I Just Wanna Dance” is perhaps the clearest statement of the EP's philosophy: after coming to Arizona from different parts of the country, there is something valuable about actually being where you are instead of constantly planning the next move. That feels familiar for a lot of people in their twenties. College ends, everyone scatters, and suddenly there is an expectation that you should already know where your career, relationships and life are going. "Matchbox" is more comfortable admitting that sometimes you don't.
Cover Zero - “The Innocent One”
Cover Zero take a completely different route into uncertainty by borrowing one of cinema's oldest storylines: the innocent person who suddenly finds themselves on the run. “The Innocent One” takes Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps as its starting point and turns the idea into a fuzzed-out rock track full of thick guitars, driving rhythms and cinematic touches. The story is familiar because it keeps coming back in movies, books and television: someone gets caught up in something they did not cause, and suddenly they have to prove who they are while everyone else assumes the worst. Cover Zero's Tyler Goldstein seems to have found a natural connection between that kind of storytelling and the rock music he grew up with, drawing on everything from The Beatles and AC/DC to Queens of the Stone Age and Black Sabbath. The band also makes a point of keeping the live side of the project completely physical, with no backing tracks, click tracks or vocal pitch correction. That old school approach fits the song. “The Innocent One” does not need much explanation once the guitars kick in. It takes a classic film premise and gives it enough weight and volume to work as a rock song in its own right.
🎧 Stream “The Innocent One” by Cover Zero on Apple Music
There is something very current about the uncertainty running through these releases. Relationships are increasingly shaped by blurred boundaries, young adulthood comes with less of a clear path than it once promised and the idea of simply knowing where you belong can feel strangely outdated. Even the older cultural references behind some of these songs from Hitchcock to the language of classic rock are being pulled into that uncertainty. Maybe that is part of what independent music does particularly well: it gives everyday confusion a form without necessarily trying to solve it. In a moment when so much culture is built around certainty, identity and constant forward movement, there is something refreshing about music that allows things to remain unresolved.
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