Daily Dose: Wilder Maker, “Impossible Summer”

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

Self-proclaimed “cosmic American” band Wilder Maker are set to release their new record, Zion, July 13 via Northern Spy Records. Latest single “Impossible Summer” is swirling and soothing, like the cool breeze that cuts the oppressive feeling of an August afternoon in New York City. Frontman Gabriel Birnbaum wrote the song about a time when he was losing touch with reality.

“It was hot in Brooklyn and I didn’t have air conditioning,” he explains. “I was in love. And after digging myself into an enormous financial hole I had to have a reckoning with what a man was, and if I was one, at least in the way that I was supposed to be. The manhood thing became a fixation for me, and I spent a lot of time watching men around me in the city and wondering how they came to exist, where their confidence came from — and how I could have come this far without ever learning any of that.”

Though written by Birnbaum, “Impossible Summer” is sung by longtime collaborator Katie Von Schleicher, who breathes a poignant softness into the track. “I cannot explain that summer,” she sings. Listen to the song below, and revisit Katie Von Schleicher’s Paste studio session right here.