Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.
Brooklyn’s Jeanines—singer/songwriter Alicia Jeanine and multi-instrumentalist Jed Smith (My Teenage Stride, Mick Trouble)—will release their self-titled debut album via Slumberland Records this summer, and the LP’s lead single and opener “Either Way” is a winning introduction to the DIY pop duo.
The track is an irresistibly sunny, sub-two-minute strummer that lives at the nexus of pop and punk. Smith’s peppy drumming and bass playing back Jeanine as she ponders the fluctuating gulf between two people over jangly guitars: “Thought that you would’ve changed by now / I’m still the same anyhow, anyhow / even though I don’t know how you feel / I though that we, we could make a deal,” she sings in the song’s relentlessly hooky verses, later deftly conveying the uncertainty and anxiety of the situation via her quavering delivery of the two-word title phrase. Growth is painful, particularly when it’s two once-close people growing apart, but part of being human is reaching out and trying to bridge that divide, even if it hurts.