With excessive heat warnings dominating forecasts here in the American Southwest and little to do about it other than stay inside or lather on sunscreen and bee line towards shade, there’s no harm in reframing our seasonal misery by listening in on lighter summer sounds coming from across the pond.
Enter Dublin five-piece The Crayon Set, who, as of now, like KUTX, have officially been around a full decade. While the quintet’s eponymous 2013 inception lies in indie pop, The Crayon Set expanded their genre color palette to include Americana and synth pop with 2017’s Lost Languages and 2021’s Downer Disco, respectively. So even though they categorize themselves as alternative pop, The Crayon Set’s clearly comfortable experimenting with a wide variety of stylistic pigments for their hook-heavy originals.
Case in point: The Crayon Set’s first single since last year’s “Love Is a Real Place” and what’s so far their standalone offering of 2023. Although the band’s handle combined with a music box intro might make a for a knee-jerk reaction that this is a children’s tune, the music video for “Sunlounger” (which features clips from 1969’s La Piscine of Alain Delon and Jane Birkin rompin’ around and breakin’ all the pool rules) cue you into a much more mature nature. “Sunlounger”‘s meditative orchestral flourishes, sensuous boy-girl vocal harmonies, and sneaky psych guitar sound almost like a previously unreleased Damon Auburn-produced track from David Gilmour’s On an Island. It’s a sonic equivalent to what summer hedonism should look like as imagined by drizzly Dubliners, not a sweltering hellscape like the one here in Texas, so click “play” and start the siesta whenever you’re ready.
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