After honing his sound over the course of four albums for Domino imprint Weird World, Alex Izenberg returned in April with his debut single for Mexican Summer, with “Old Gold” building upon the soft-rock foundation established with a new backing band on 2024’s Alex Izenberg & the Exiles. With no word yet of a label debut, his follow-up single arrives today in the form of “South California Blues,” a subject the songwriter surely knows well as a born-and-bred Angelino. While the track feels as moored within the dock of yacht rock as it is the hazy definition of neo-psych, the splash of pedal steel heard in the background adds yet another layer of depth to the seamless composition.
“South California Blues is a meditation on memory and impermanence,” Izenberg shares of the song’s lyrical subject matter, which likely fed into its dreamy sound. “The song began as a reflection on a relationship, but gradually became about something larger, the strange realization that entire chapters of our lives can disappear while remaining vividly alive within us. Time moves forward, yet certain people, places, and feelings seem to exist outside of it.”
The track arrives with a music video directed by Isabella Uhl that distills the song’s themes of nostalgia, memory, and the SoCal lifestyle. Check that out below.
