It takes about 2.6 seconds for Husbands‘ seismic new single “Shake” to wrap its love around the listener and comfort and console through a hazy barrage of slowgaze enchantment. The Boston band led by Zach Page and Patrick Kenny delivered their latest on Friday (July 30), a one-two punch with b-side “Opiate Hope” that sets a tone for their forthcoming full-length this fall, and stake a simple claim to being one of the most explosive and gripping songs to come out of Boston this year.
Engineered, mixed, and mastered by Dereck Blackburn at Quiethouse Recording, with additional production work done by Blackburn at The Record Co., “Shake” is a powerful ode to the things that motivate us, and help us push forward, in times of need and times of otherworldly despair. That they arrive as society slowly comes to grips with the fact that a return to normalcy will be indefinitely delayed, the idea of post-pandemic life dissipating into the smoky air, is all too fitting. Clocking in at just over six minutes in total, “Shake” provides the frenzied warmth, while the more spacious and reflective “Opiate Hope” acts like the morning-after comedown.
“‘Shake’ and ‘Opiate Hope’ were written around the same time — I was pondering a lot about what brings me personal happiness (as many people presumably have been as they start stepping back into a relatively-uncharted pandemic world) and how what brings me joy might mean nothing to somebody else,” Page tells Vanyaland. “During downtime, I was also watching documentaries on the Heaven’s Gate cult and movies like Mandy (literature & film influence often find their way into our subject matter). I kept coming back to an additional concept of something massive altering your world, specifically for the worse — a pandemic, organized cults, religion, drugs, etc.”
The two singles here, the follow-up to Husbands’ 2019 sophomore LP New England Casket Co., represent not so much a sonic shift as a pure awakening, a merging of heavy, sludgy alternative rock with the precision and depth of shoegaze and space rock.
“Although the songs are very different in terms of tempo and timbre,” Page adds, “they share a lot of the same ideas lyrically — finding a sense of bliss and contentment in life-altering events, even if that sense of hope is false and everything is falling apart.”
It’s a sign of the times, both in the sense of reality and the fantasies we need to get through it all. Dive in to both tracks below, and save some space for “Shake” on those year-end lists.