Most outlets covering Peel Dream Magazine’s glistening new single “Lie In The Gutter” will, probably accurately, attribute its sonic DNA to the ’60s or ’70s or some recognized sonic movement of space-aged psych-pop. But for a certain segment of Boston kids-turned-adults, the hypnotic new single from the Los Angeles trio has a very specific transportive effect, one that finds us excitedly elevating the dank old stairwell of The Upstairs Lounge in North Station on a lost Friday in the late-’90s, en route to an elevated wonderland called the pill as DJ Jen spun an inspired retro-influenced bedroom set to the early-arrivers.
It’s a playful daydream of excited enchantment that gives way to blissed out nights, rolling carefree through morning as the beat loops in our headspace of the halcyon days where tomorrow never happened. Suddenly, someone leans in and asks: “You feeling it?”
The gently sweeping “Lie In The Gutter” will be featured on Peel Dream Magazine’s forthcoming album Rose Main Reading Room, out via Topshelf Records on September 4. It’s a tune canvassed in romance and nostalgia, and the beauty of it all is how it pulls each of us in its own gravitational direction. It looks sharp, and sounds even more so even with its rounded edges in the smooth shape of a Perkins Street kitchen table.
“Lie In The Gutter” arrived last week (June 26) with an accompanying music video, and all that is missing is a quick cruise down a Causeway Street that’s now unrecognizable to everyone from a MassArt freshman to a bartender in a Byron Dafoe shirtsey. But it does look to the west, like many of us once did.
“This video is cut from footage we filmed on a few different tours between the fall of 2023 and Spring of 2024, and I love it because it captures the amazing feeling and energy that those trips had,” says Peel Dream Magazine’s Joe Stevens. “There’s cameos from bands we were touring with like Chastity Belt and Gift, and friends like Simi Sohota from Healing Potpourri. A lot of it was shot in the Pacific Northwest and features some hikes we got to take among the dense green forests up there. I wanted to capture that stuff because this theme of ‘the natural world’ has been jostling around my my brain for awhile and is a big part of the album.”
Stevens continues: “The song is meant to be a very simple statement about finding joy and wonder in life despite whatever may be on your mind. The phrase it’s taken from is the trite but sweet Oscar Wilde quote ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’.”
Sounds like a Friday night to us.
Get into “Lie In The Gutter” below, and hit The Sinclair early on August 11, when Peel Dream Magazine open for Wild Nothing at the Cambridge venue.
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