New Music: Sungaze – Feel Better Tomorrow

The best songs can often be rooted in personal experience, be it a fleeting event or something that dominates the life of the writer. The latter is at the heart of Feel Better Tomorrow.

It sees Cincinnati, Ohio, based Sungaze – centred on a creative force of Ivory Snow and Ian Hilvert – typifying the new wave of shoegaze, one where life’s trials and uncertainties are tackled head-on, not hidden behind a wall of noise and smoke.

The song trends to the more melodic and dreamlike end of the genre, imbued with a sense of yearning and wistfulness that nevertheless has a positivity about it that will lift your spirits and help soothe away moments of doubt. And if it does that for even just a moment in time, isn’t that worth it?

With a sound and sentiment that will appeal to fans of Beach Fossils, Slow Pulp, and Wishy, Feel Better Tomorrow comes from a very personal place for Snow, detailing how chronic illness impacted her life – especially making music, which is so important to her.

“The way this song came to be feels a little bit divine. Ian [Hilvert, lead guitar] and I were taking a walk around our neighborhood, going over our to-do lists for the following day when we’d planned to work on recording some new song ideas,” says Snow.

“The conversation eventually shifted to the topic of promotion. We’ve often bemoaned the struggle that is balancing the time and effort needed to put ourselves ‘out there’ with the need for income and the time that working a day job requires.”

“On this particular day, I realized just how angry I was about the hand I had been dealt–I spent the majority of my 20s in various states of ‘unwellness’, ranging from months spent bedridden and countless ER trips, to large swaths of time where on the outside everything looked normal but inside, I was a dissociated, anxiety-ridden mess, struggling just to make it through the day.”

“I felt like my chance at realizing my dreams had been taken from me and it was hard not to blame my body. If I had been a ‘normal’, healthy 20-something, I know my 20s would have looked a lot more like living out of a van with my best friends for weeks at a time, playing in new cities and building connections, and a lot less like the interiors of the ERs and doctor’s offices where I became a frequent-flyer.”

“I didn’t say it out loud, but during that conversation, I realized the time was approaching where I would need to actually confront all of these feelings in some way, and I could feel a song would be coming.”

“Ian went to the studio the next day and I stayed home. About mid-way through the afternoon, I get an email from him containing an mp3 titled Feel Better Tomorrow. It was an instrumental track based on a riff he had been playing around the apartment for a few days prior.”

“I was immediately sucked in and I knew this was the song. We ended up restructuring it a couple times before landing on what it is today and it was definitely a labor of love. There were times where I think we both wanted to give up on the track, but we pushed through and trusted the process and ended up with what may be my favorite song yet.”

“It didn’t turn out the way we initially planned, but it came out the way I think it was meant to be. In a way, that turn of events ended up mirroring my experience with chronic illness better than I could have planned.”

Feel Better Tomorrow can be heard on Bandcamp, Spotify, and YouTube Music. For further listening options and to learn more about Sungaze, head to Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Header photo by Charlie Hausfeld