Courtney Garvin of The Courtneys has started a new project called Gum Country with multi-instrumentalist Connor Mayer. The project started in Vancouver from various four-track recordings made in an apartment, and they’re now based in Los Angeles, where they recorded their debut full-length Somewhere, out June 19. The album will be self-released digitally and released on vinyl via Kingfisher Bluez (Canada), cassette via Burger Records (U.S.) and Dinosaur City Records (Australia) and on CD via Waterslide Records (Japan). Today, they’ve shared the lead single and title track with an accompanying retro music video.
“Somewhere” merges ’90s noise rock and twee pop, and it will give you that same euphoric tingle you felt after falling in love with your first underground jangle pop band. Nimble guitar riffs swarm around Garvin’s subtle, sweet vocals, and it captures everything great about fuzzy rock and good-natured, classic indie-pop. The scratchy footage of the band in a warehouse only further emphasizes their grunge-y, throwback glory as it looks like a Breeders or Sonic Youth video you would’ve seen endlessly on MTV back in the day.
“I wrote ‘Somewhere’ a couple years after moving to LA,” Garvin says of the lead single. “It’s about leaving a place that you are comfortable in and landing in a strange new one, and discovering what parts of your identity remain and which were left behind. The first line I wrote was ‘haven’t felt this way in a while, I can’t think straight can’t hide my smile, I guess this is gonna be my life for a while’, and then it was just a process of unravelling that thought. I think the song could be about the range of emotions that come with any big change, and ultimately settling on a mellow excitement for vulnerability.”
Listen to “Somewhere” below, and preorder their album here.
