Ok Cowgirl, the full-band indie-rock project founded by Brooklyn-based songwriter Leah Lavigne, have sounded fully formed since their 2021 debut EP, confidently titled Not My First Rodeo. Yet the opening track and lead single from their recently announced follow-up LP further expanded their sound with the help of increasingly in-demand sound-expander Alex Farrar, who’s helped usher in the equally scuzzy feelings and guitar of groups like Wednesday, Snail Mail, and Indigo De Souza (and, most recently, mercury) in recent years. “Little Splinters” lands somewhere between this current wave of emotive songwriters with jagged riffs and the dreamier pop numbers of prior last decade’s contemporaries, such as Angel Olsen and Mitski at their breezy indie-pop peaks.
Today the group is sharing the second single from Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut, “Forever,” which is a cooler, more subdued confessional playing into the album title’s theme of inner turmoil. “I wrote ‘Forever’ while I was grappling with the idea of leaving my first serious relationship,” Lavigne discloses. “It was a strange and new experience to me, to care about someone so deeply and be able to see a future with them, yet be plagued by what-ifs. I felt trapped by my life, and I mourned the loss of potential futures I’d never get to explore. As I searched for a way out of this feeling I couldn’t help but wish I could bend time.”
The single’s Nicholas Motyka–directed video betrays its subtle sound and presents Lavigne in glamorous outfits and moody lighting as she digs her own grave, only to fall eternally into a dark abyss (probably not the type of thing to be taken at face value). Check it out below, and pre-order Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut here. The band will also be playing a release show in Brooklyn on August 16—find more info on the event here.
