Sun June Find Their Way Through Uncertainty on Bad Dream Jaguar

Sometimes adulthood doesn’t work out quite the way you thought it would. There are moments when things that once seemed so clear start to look blurry, and what you took for granted feels less settled. Expectations change and priorities shift in a way that can rearrange our lives. Sun June’s latest is a soundtrack for those occasions.

Bad Dream Jaguar is a collection of songs threading their way through the uncertainty. The Austin band made the album during a period of dislocation: guitarist Stephen Salisbury moved from Texas to North Carolina in 2020, changing the nature of his creative (and romantic) relationship with singer and bandleader Laura Colwell until she joined him in 2022. The dozen tracks on Bad Dream Jaguar seek to make sense of that distance, their solitude and, in an overarching way, a fractured nostalgia for what had come before—and the often painful work of letting it go.

It’s a subtle album, built around gentle, dream-like musical arrangements that belie the tougher sentiments underpinning these songs. The narrators here are often trying to figure out where they stand, in relation to a significant other, themselves, the past, the future. “You were searching for a reason to be mad / Babe, I got plenty of them,” Colwell sings on “Mixed Bag,” her soft voice wrapped in layers of guitar, ghostly backing vocals and a piano vamp that lands just so between lyrics.

Befitting an album that took shape around a long-distance relationship, there’s a lot of road imagery on Bad Dream Jaguar. Colwell sings about long drives and headlights in the distance, and the lyrics often play like the reveries that blossom between the highway lines on road trips. She lets her mind wander through remembered scenes and settings that have the feel of creased snapshots she found tucked away in the glove compartment. Colwell is fighting to stay awake behind the wheel, and true to herself, while singing along in the car on “John Prine.” On “Washington Square,” her narrator is remembering when she and a partner were young and foolish “back when all the things to come hadn’t yet,” while “Sage” finds her holding tight to glimpses of the past while staving off the melancholy of a solitary present.

Gleaming electric guitar licks over a more muted rhythm part on “Sage” enhance the late-night vibe, though not every song has such a somber sensibility. A foreboding synthesizer sound lurking amid the guitars of “Easy Violence” adds a rougher texture, while the hook on “Get Enough” is bouncy in a way that’s understated, and all the more alluring for it. That’s true of Bad Dream Jaguar as a whole: Sun June’s music unfolds with artful restraint to reveal, at its best, a core that is quietly profound.

Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. Follow him on Mastodon or visit his website.