While there’s probably a case to be made that every album released in the year 2023 could be considered dystopian science fiction in some capacity, Chicago garage-rockers Ovef Ow welcome the concept with open arms on their forthcoming fuzzy debut album Vs. the Worm—the title alone invoking images of Shai-Hulud. Yet as the record’s latest single, “Daylight,’ reminds us, the lyrical themes maintain a familiarity to the tedium of everyday life, such as the sense of loneliness that’s felt particularly hard to shake post-pandemic.
“It’s about when you’re feeling in conflict over an issue where you see there’s a clear, bright line and you believe the side you stand on is obviously right,” vocalist Marites Velasquez shares of the track, a recording equally new-wave-y and no-wave-y which was penned in a remote cabin in the summer of 2020. “But then you’re shocked to find everyone else—especially people you care about—on the other side. This has come up for me in those times I felt abandoned by or at odds with a loved one.”
The video the track arrives with (directed by Velasquez, and shot and edited on her phone) takes a lighter approach to the subject matter with this sense of loneliness afflicting a disembodied wooden hand as it goes about its daily routine: yoga, therapy, reading (naturally) A Farewell to Arms, brushing its…somethings. “We had this wooden hand in our practice room for a couple of years and I thought it would be fun to do something with it,” Velasquez notes. “It's a lonely hand going about its day who dreams of rock stardom and finding connection.”
Watch the video below, and pre-order Vs. the Worm—which was mixed and mastered with Sweeping Promises in Lawrence, Kansas—here.
