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May 02, 2025 By Caleb Campbell

Attention Bird Utopia is the new project from LA-based songwriters Harrison Whitford and Eli Hirsch. Whitford got his start as a collaborator and guitarist for indie rock’s heavy hitters, playing with Phoebe Bridgers, Matt Berninger, and Conor Oberst, while Eli Hirsch is has produced for records from Suki Waterhouse, Cautious Clay, and Say Lou Lou over the years. The pair met while Hirsch was working on Waterhouse’s sophomore record and quickly began writing together, amassing a collection of new songs that trade in classic pop and folk songcraft with a poetic indie edge.

Those tracks make up the band’s debut LP, Best of Kings, due out next month on June 6th. The band have already shared their lead single, “Infinity Inside a Shopping Cart,” followed by the record’s title track. Today, they’re sharing the album’s third single, “Cary,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Cary” is a slight and nostalgic effort, strolling gently through the haze of memory. The track finds the pair dwelling on the people who give shape to our lives, wondering where they are now and how their life turned out. The track opens with tender vocal melodies and solitary acoustic tones, musing on a treasured connection faded with time: “Cary are you living at your mother’s place / By the five and dime, still playing the bass? / Cary do you ever think of me still? / I think about you, and I always will.” As the song winds onward, hints of keys and drums fill out the mix as the vocals grow more impassioned, wishing for familiar places and people before ending on a final question: “Is heaven a place where you still dream / Under Dayton skies by the Dairy Queen? / Oh Cary will I ever see you again?”

Hirsch says of the track, “‘Cary’ is an ode to suburbia, the malaise of summers and winters past without much purpose, of love built up and burned to the ground. It’s about the memories that breeze in and out of your mind every so often that almost seem like film stills from another person’s life, featuring whoever you used to be and whoever you used to know. It’s about imagining what might have happened to so and so; did they ever fix that crack in their windshield? Did their grandfather die? Did they ever move out of that sleepy little town? How many cats do they have now? Are they still chasing a dream? It’s a small fiction for the lost times of a life you can never return to.”

Check out the song below. Best of Kings is out everywhere on June 6th.