End Your Week With Stef Chura’s Beautifully Melancholic Single “Sour Honey”

Detroit-native indie rocker and Paste Best of What’s Next pick Stef Chura released on Friday the b-side from her forthcoming 7”, set to drop as a Record Store Day release on April 21. The song, titled “Sour Honey,” follows the double-sided vinyl’s previous release, a-side “Degrees.” Check out that first track’s lyric video below.

“Degrees” b/w “Sour Honey” was produced by Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo. The duo started recording music after running into each other during a show, per Stereogum. Chura recalled her first encounter with Toledo in a statement:

I met Will Toledo in 2016 when we did some touring together with Car Seat Headrest. We chatted at the Empty Bottle in Chicago at our first show and he told me that he found my music on Tumblr via an article that compared us to each other. He invited us on a couple of tours that year before Messes was out and before we had a label or booking agent or release plans or any “stuff.” In May of 2017 we ran into each other again at the Empty Bottle. Will was mixing Twin Fantasy and came out to our gig there with the engineer he’d been working with. He invited us to the studio to check out the record the next day. When we stopped by Will had finished mixing early and asked us if we had anything going on recording-wise. I said I have a couple of songs that got cut from Messes I want to record for a 7-inch and he was like “Cool, wanna record them right now? I’ll play bass.

Out of that partnership came Chura’s latest offering, “Sour Honey.” The single’s title perfectly encompasses the sentiment found inside the beautifully melancholic track. The song is naturally simplistic, with ambient guitar chords driving the melody for Chura’s voice and a dark piano accenting the song’s hook with smashing power chords. The musician spoke about the inspiration behind her pensive single in a statement, saying:

I wrote [“Sour Honey”] during the time that I was a cocktail waitress at a strip club. It’s partly about that and mostly about the deeply visceral feeling of embarrassment and bullying: “I’m dripping sour honey, and it all starts to feel funny, I didn’t mean to go to places I don’t know.” It’s also in tune with knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway. A theme for Messes, but maybe not an intentional concept? Just a theme I’ve been through many times in life.

“Degrees” b/w “Sour Honey” releases in digital format on Friday via the artist’s Bandcamp page. Chura is set to release 1,000 copies on limited-edition 7” vinyl for Record Store Day 2018, tomorrow, April 21.

Listen to “Sour Honey” below, followed by Chura’s 2017 performance at Same Sky Productions in Austin, Texas, via the Paste Cloud. Then, revisit the video for her single “Thin” right here.