Chicago has long been a hotbed for shoegaze acts coasting just beneath the radar, with Astrobrite helping to keep the genre torch alive in the 2000s and Lightfoils embracing the genre around the time it became chic again in the early 2010s. Now that shoegaze is reaching more ears than it ever has in the 2020s, members of both groups converged a few years ago to form Snowcuffs, a new band that takes a slightly dreamier approach than either of its predecessors, as represented in last March’s debut EP Sink Down.
Nearly a year to the day of that project’s release, the band will be dropping their second EP, Sweet Gravity, on March 5. The transfixing “In Blue” marked the project’s first single, and today we’re getting a follow-up tune titled “Burst” that sounds a bit tenser, with more disconnect between the wailing, reverb-drenched guitars and the gentle lilt of the vocals. As the band explains, the track is about feeling overwhelmed by “all the possibilities of identity,” or the struggle to know which life path to follow. “‘Burst’ is inspired by the fig tree metaphor in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath,” the band notes. “The fig tree represents all the different lives the protagonist could live. Each fig is a future—artist, wife, intellectual, mother—and the tragedy is that she wants all of them. But by refusing to choose, the figs rot and fall. Ambivalence isn’t neutral, it’s destructive.”
Matching the disconnect in its sound, the track’s music video sees vocalist Stephanie Nikolas foregrounded among the natural greenery of a park setting while her backing band performs in a dark indoor space with the silhouettes of tree branches projected behind them. Check out the clip directed by Dave Rentauskas below.
