We didn’t bother checking the weather report for this Friday across the Northeast, but a cloud cover and salty gray skies seem to hang overhead upon listening to “Fade (Rainy Day demo)”, the melancholic new single from Catbells. The enigmatic Los Angeles-based, New England-raised singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist releases her latest today (May 21), and it’s a floating dream-pop number that hovers delicately around a reflection on lost love. Drawing from ’60s folk and early ’90s shoegaze and alt-rock, “Fade” finds its weight in the margins, a lush dose of lo-fi indie that swarms under the covers where it’s safe to confront a feeling.
“The song really wrote itself and the music needed to match the feeling of how the words felt,” says Catbells. “There are few people who are lucky enough to escape the feeling of a completely broken heart, and feeling like the person you loved so much just moved on like it was nothing, leaving you left there with a hole where your heart once was.”
Catbells draws her moniker from the hiking spot referenced in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, and there’s a similar type of world building nestled within her sound, which is at once both hauntingly familiar and crisply personal. The lyric video for “Fade”, illustrated and directed by Gris Visa, swirls around an extension of these themes, with a sad cat biding farewell under a starry night sky. It might not be the type of track you absorb before heading out, but it’s the kind that will greet you when you come home alone, confused, and ready to shutter away from the cruel world outside.
