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Dec 10, 2024 By Caleb Campbell

Chatham Rabbits is the indie folk project of husband and wife duo Sarah and Austin McCombie. The pair have been making music together under the moniker for over half a decade, releasing a trio of full-length albums immersed in the worlds of folk and Americana, 2019’s All I Want From You, 2020’s The Yoke Is Easy, The Burden is Full, and 2022’s If You See Me Riding By. However, during that time, their musical and personal lives have continued to shift, leading to the inflection point represented by their forthcoming fourth full-length album, Be Real Wtih Me.

The pair describe their latest record as a collective coming of age, a plea for honesty as the band and partners navigate the changes that come with adulthood. “We got married so young,” Sarah says. “We are simply not the same people we once were because playing music for a living has consumed and transformed us. This lifestyle has presented us with exhausting tour schedules, vulnerable songs that force us to talk about our marriage, difficult business decisions, and the ever-complicated dilemma of mixing art and money and friends and employees.” Meanwhile, the album also finds them evolving their musical approach, coloring their plaintive songwriting and organic instrumental tones with newfound touches like drum machines, synth pads, and pedal steel.

The band have already shared a pair of singles from the record, “Matador” and “Collateral Damage,” and today they’re back with another new track, “Childhood Friends,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Childhood Friends” is a reflective folk ramble that finds Sarah and Austin taking a melancholic tour of old friendships. Where songwriting convention often reserves the bright, sunlit energy for a chorus, Chatham Rabbits take the inverse approach. The track opens on energetic verses tinged with breezy guitar chords and amber-hued pedal steel before bringing the tempo down for a series of wandering, free-floating choruses. Sarah and Austin’s vocals search and simmer, never quite resolving into the warm and familiar chord progressions that often color folk and Americana. Instead, they mirror the uncertainties in the lyrics, which dissect the loneliness of growing up and knowing you’ll never recapture the friendships of your youth: “Do you think they will miss me? / Or dream of me like I do them? / It’s hard to stomach that I won’t be making childhood friends again.”

Sarah says of the track, It’s a crazy realization when you learn that once you’re an adult and you’ve lost your childhood friends, there’s no going back. You cannot remake childhood friends. You cannot turn back the clock. When that truth finally sunk into my gut it devastated me. Don’t get me wrong, all of the friends I’ve made in music, college, and adulthood are wonderful, but they will never be able to replace the deeply intimate and fiery female friendships of my youth. In this song, I reckon with my new awareness, plan to take matters into my own hands moving forwards, and ponder the question that still sometimes wakes me in my dreams: ‘do you think that they miss me?’”

Check out the song below. Be Real With Me is due out everywhere on February 14th.