Two and a half years removed from the release of her isolationist travelogue Lavender, NYC-based songwriter Gemma Laurence finds herself back in her natural habitat on her forthcoming third album, We Were Bodies Underwater—for better and for worse. With city living comes a more complex sound on her new material, as well as all the complex feelings that come with life in Brooklyn: love, heartbreak, and, ultimately, a sense of gratitude for the journey.
Today, Laurence is sharing the third single ahead of the album’s July 18 release via MainFactor and Mad Dragon Records. As its title suggests, “Harbor” is a song about transience, albeit focusing more on feelings and experiences than seaworthy vessels temporarily docking before returning to sea. “I wanted to write a song about that—about welcoming something in only to let it go again,” the songwriter shares. “‘Harbor’ is a very hopeful song, but there’s also a profound grief at its core. It’s all about saying goodbye and clinging to this hope that someone, one day, will come back. This song really finds me grappling with this huge uncertainty in the aftermath of a breakup. And it was a breakup with someone I truly believed to be the love of my life.”
Like the emotions behind it, the folky, lightly Americana-indebted single swells and fades at unexpected moments. “It’s hard to listen back to this song where I am now, but I’m glad I captured the feeling when I did,” Laurence adds. “Because, like, how beautiful is it to feel that deeply at all? What a gift.”
Below, you can find the camcorder-shot music video for the track which, like the song, spotlights fleeting moments.
