If the emotive indie-pop produced by Hew sounds familiar to you, that may be because half of the band—including vocalist and guitarist Lindsay Minton—also plays in the long-running Houston emo revival outfit Football, etc. Rather than reveling in the genre’s heyday (or one of its many waves, anyway), Hew is instead focused on pushing forward, more directly aligning with a young generation of indie rock acts who came of age idolizing Hayley Williams. That identity was introduced a few weeks ago when the quartet released the title track from their debut album, Your Version.
The record’s single, though, does see the band looking back in a sense. Over dreamy guitar strums, Minton reflects on growing up in the church—less so the religious aspects of that and more so the rituals, which she still finds a sense of comfort in. “I’m not sure I ever fully understood it, but I liked doing it—the standing, sitting, kneeling, reciting prayers from memory, the whole choreography of it,” she shares of her Catholic upbringing. “Those gestures feel strangely comforting to me now. I’m still drawn to the symbols of it: the things we do to create our own comfort, the things we carry because they soothe us, even when they come with a kind of weight we can’t explain. To me, it’s a song about the rituals of hope...and the question of whether any of it matters at all.”
Check out the new track below, and pre-order Your Version here ahead of its July 10 release via Tiny Engines.
