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Apr 18, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Deliliah Lovejoy and Eli Lu

Seattle-based indie rock singer/songwriter Mia Day debuted with her 2018 full-length effort Gold, which initially found her evoking strains of plaintive Americana. However, rather than staying in that lane, the subsequent years were ones of transition. During this period she attended college and toured the festival circuit before navigating a year of personal upheaval, during which she wrote her forthcoming sophomore album, Hellier, Forever.

“For months I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I would just write songs every day,” Day explains. “It’s also my scream-into-the-void album. It’s me saying, ‘I will not disappear and I will not let a single person destroy me.”

She returned last month with the album’s lead single, “Severed,” which found Day evoking the grunge and alt rock of the ‘90s, and today she’s back with another new track, “Mountain Song,” premiering with Under the Radar.

Where Day’s previous track burst out the gates with distorted guitars and big melodies, “Mountain Song” offers a more understated slow-burn, landing closer to the sun-dappled folk of her previous record. However, running alongside Day’s heartfelt vocal performance and pastoral acoustic strums is a darker undercurrent, colored by twisting and tangled guitar tones. The track finds Day tearing through this shadowy haze of tones at one moment, only to settle into a warm soaring sprawl in the next. All along her lyrics search through feelings of heartache and longing, pining for a lover who is no longer there: “It’s gonna take a while for me to hear a song without thinking of you / Because I still want to / How do I just forget everything I felt with you? / I don’t want to.”

Check out the song early below and pre-save it here. Hellier, Forever is out on May 17th.