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Jul 03, 2024 By Caleb Campbell

New Gaze are a new indie trio outfit based out of London. Together, bandmates Andrés Alcover, Rollo Ellison, and Julian Bayliss pull from vintage ‘60s and ‘70s influences, blending keening vocal harmonies with swells of lush baroque pop strings. The band have largely kept their music to the live setting, releasing their first two singles, “All We Can See” and “Dystopian Days” on vinyl only. However, today they are sharing their music video for “Dystopian Days,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Dystopian Days” finds the band locked in a dreamy waltz, with the trio’s vocals dancing amongst winding piano lines and lithe rhythms. Later the band dresses their vocals with ornate layers of strings before stripping the track back to only intimate acoustic tones, transitioning into shadowy territory in the track’s closing moments. The results are beautiful and evocative, but they also have an undercurrent of discord. Meanwhile, the track’s lyrics move between uncertainty and euphoria, reflecting on moments of both joy and pain: “I remember the days, caught up in old ways / Didn’t know where to turn cause my head was a maze / A dystopian dream, I was living within / Trying to run from myself with a heart full of sin / Then I discovered, there’s another way to live / The beauty around us / Can remind us, how to breathe.”

The band says of the track, “‘Dystopian Days’ speaks of a time in youth when you feel lost and don’t know what direction you’re heading in, your mind ridden with fragmented thoughts and living self-destructively in an attempt to fill an internal void. It moves into a sort of epiphany in the chorus through the realisation that there is another, more light-filled way of living, opening your eyes to the beauty that surrounds us and remembering to breathe. As it progresses, it speaks of how love and infatuation can also pull you out of that darker place and ignite a whole world of emotion inside you where that void once lived. It ends reminiscing about the struggle, the fear of returning to it but at the same time, acknowledging that life is shifting and starting to turn.

Andrés had been experimenting with open guitar tunings for the first time, with no real intention of writing anything as a consequence. Not being very good at simply playing guitar for the sake of enjoyment or practice, he ended up writing this song somewhat by accident. After playing it to Rollo and Julian, it was decided this would be one to finish together and once the rest of the band (Zak, Archie and Mischa) had written their own instrument parts, it was included in the songs that would later be recorded at Rockfield Studios,”

Check out the song and accompanying video below.