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Mar 04, 2021 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Dan Robb

For many bands, the pandemic transition to virtual music-making was a new one. For Canadian indie band Tearjerker though, it was a return to familiar territory. After passing bedroom recordings around since the band’s founding in 2008, they decamped to a small cottage in North Ontario to record their new EP, Deep End, in 2019. Of course, the pandemic made that closeness impossible, forcing them back to their familiar piecemeal writing process. Fortunately, that has done little to blunt these songs’ impact, with each new voice memo, found sound, or skeletal beat coming together in an elaborate tapestry. The band has now returned with their newest track, “Be You,” premiering early with Under the Radar.

With “Be You” Tearjerker once again constructs gorgeously textured walls of sound, bringing out their shoegaze, dream pop, and lo-fi influences for a blissful ride. Most often vocals take up the melodic focus in indie but with “Be You” they’re just another in the song’s wide array of melodic compositions. Buried under layers of synths, guitar, and percussion, the vocals call out weightless and ethereal. Instead, Tearjerker wraps the song in enlaced walls of instrumentation and warm synth melodies, building to a towering hook. Each of the moving parts works independently, but all together they take on new life, washing over in waves of nostalgic melody.

Tearjerker’s Micah Bonte says of the song, “Written in one day last summer, we tried to tap into the feeling of being unmoored in a storm, frantically looking for a lifeline. We asked ourselves: Will anything actually change when this shit is over?” Check out the song below and watch for Deep End, coming March 19th.