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Jul 11, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Ryan Miller

Indie outfit Indigo Wild debuted in 2018 with their full-length record, Wonder Wander, carving out a layered sound that pulls influence from dream pop, emo, and garage rock. The band began writing their follow-up in the year that followed before getting derailed by the pandemic. Along the way, bandmates Garet Camella (Guitar / Lead Vocals), Michael Norris (Lead Guitar / Vocals), Chris Carter (Bass / Vocals), Jason Winner (Drums), and Varun Ramanujam (Keys / Percussion) all found themselves spread across multiple cities, forcing them to work remotely to finish their latest collection of songs.

The band are back with a new EP this year, which they introduced early this year with their single “Daylight.” Today they’re back with another new track, “Sleeping In,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Sleeping In” captures the band’s balance of dreamy nostalgia and restless energy, opening with shimmering guitar tones and propulsive drumming. The math rock-influenced guitar and driving rhythms make for an entrancing combination, bringing out both the band’s melodic side and their bittersweet undertones. Meanwhile, amidst all of the catchy guitar lines and warm harmonies, vocalist Garet Carmella offers a wistful tribute to slowing down and focusing on those around you. The first verse was written in 2019 while the second came together after the pandemic, an element that colors the track’s reflective themes: “I was hearing you speak / But I was never really listening / Back when my head and my feet / Were always moving, but never really synced / It took the whole world shutting down / To finally feel them touch the ground / I felt good the day I slowed it down.”

The band says of the track, “Sleeping In” is a song about learning to slow down—about recognizing that you can’t keep pace with a past version of yourself, and embracing that it’s even better if you don’t try to. We wrote this song with a collection of songs that will be on our forthcoming EP in a period of transition for our band and our individual lives too. We had just come off of a year-long hiatus as a band and were fresh with new ideas and a desire to shed the parameters we’d put on ourselves for our previous record and shows.

This track started with a super mathy riff, which is heard in the intro, and it evolves into a faster-paced, simpler approach to writing than our earlier material. We wanted to explore letting our writing breathe a bit—it was a totally new approach for us.

We recorded most of the instrumental tracks on “Sleeping In” with a simple 4-track interface, a laptop, and a handful of sm58’s in our practice space in 2019. And then a pandemic hit—and this song sat on a harddrive for a few years.

But after a spontaneous decision to listen back to the demo in late 2023, we decided to finish the song. That’s when we wrote verse 2, which interestingly reflects on the 2019 lyrics of verse 1. All vocals, some bass, and auxiliary layers were re-tracked in late 2023 and early 2024.

To us, this song reflects the adventure of exploring new ideas and a new approach: more instinct, eyes forward, movement, listening. It’s a patch-worked DIY approach to documenting our ideas. It’s the result of no recent past and no future plan, which is how we’re planning to operate as a band moving forward too.”

Check out the song early below.