Daily Dose: Sloucher, “Up & Down”

Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.

Seattle’s Sloucher have released the video for “Up & Down,” the third single from their forthcoming debut album Be True, out Nov. 16 on Swoon Records.

Stop slouching. Sit up straight. Look presentable. If you don’t, you’ll mess up your back, and when you’re old and bent over, you’ll wish you’d listened. Those phrases we were told as kids had a promise within that if we do the right thing now, we can guarantee the happiness of our older selves. Sloucher’s “Up & Down” is the breaking of that promise. It’s the realization that just because you’re older doesn’t mean you have any better of an idea of how to be happy.

Being in a band—is that following a dream? Or is it setting the future you up for pain, for poverty, for disappointment? Sloucher can’t seem to tell. “I’m 20 something, going through motions,” singer Jay Clancy muses. “Then I write it down / turn it into sound, now it seems right / I will do my best to fill this emptiness, I wanna know myself one day.” The grown-up you is no closer at 27 than they were at 17, it seems to say. “Why am I here again / surrounded by friends, casual in disarray,” Clancy sings later. When does that feeling go away?

The song draws on the canon of emotionally attuned rock music for its sonics, finding life in the jangle and haze of artists like R.E.M. and Elliott Smith. But that legacy of success offers no easy comfort here. “Everything is nothing / I’m still spinning like before, and I don’t think I have the desire anymore.” As beat-down as these lyrics sound, the song does not wallow. Just as there’s no easy comfort, there’s also no hopeless resignation. There are only questions.

Watch the video for “Up & Down” below. Sloucher will be performing a handful of hometown shows this November—find their dates further down.

Sloucher Tour Dates:

November
15 – Seattle, Wash. @ Sonic Boom Records
16 – Seattle, Wash. @ Easy Street Records
23 – Seattle, Wash. @ Barboza (record release show)