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Feb 06, 2023 By Caleb Campbell

Austin-based indie folk outfit Under the Rug are back later this month with their third full-length album, Homesick For Another World. Their latest record quickly follows their 2022 sophomore record, Dear Adeline, yet it also shows the marks of months of fevered craftsmanship and years of expanding musical horizons. In the midst of the pandemic, the band threw themselves into songwriting, incorporating new instruments and taking their tightly honed musicianship in new directions, all while balancing their urgent lyricism with a light warm-hearted touch.

The band have already teased the record with a series of singles, most recently with their latest track, “Turkey Vulture,” and today they’re back with an accompanying video for the song, premiering with Under the Radar.

“Turkey Vulture” acts as a powerful opener to the record, kicking it off with some striking mandolin, twinkling piano, and breezy swaying melodies. Steadily, the band layers walls of guitar and pounding drums into the track, letting it build from a sunny indie folk meditation into a mountainous rock stomp. Meanwhile, lead vocalist and lyricist Casey Dayan strikes a similar balance of contrasts, infusing the track with both a downcast soulful croon and a rousing defiant spirit, singing “Nobody can tell me how to feel / I feel how I feel / Well nobody / Nobody can tell me how to feel / Nothing is ideal / But I am fine.”

Dayan says of the track, “When we moved to Texas, I had been feeling a little bit grim about everything. We took a big risk by moving, my mom had just died, and we had spent the last couple years owning and operating (and living in) a brick-and-mortar recording studio in Carson, CA, which is like the Flint, MI of the Pacific Coast. Making this band work had always been a pipe-dream, but one we threw our weight into whole-heartedly, over and over, to little success.

The next few years would be life-changing for us, but we didn’t know that yet. Instead, we would sit on the cold concrete porch of our new little mobile home and run through our ever-changing list of next steps with mugs of hot tea in our hands. Every once in a while, a roadkill deer attracted an army of vultures, sometimes dozens of them, who would leer at us like old-timey counts from the walnut tree at the edge of our property.

They reminded me of death, but they were also powerful and prehistoric, somehow—and somewhere along the way, I started to really like them. In some ways, for me at least, they became a symbol of befriending grim-ness: that death is inevitable, that this lil’ world of ours can be terrible and cruel, but it is also a beautiful world, and in many ways, is what we make of it.”

Check out the song and video below. Homesick For Another World is out everywhere on February 17th.