New Music: silk daisys – haunted house

Though they regards haunted house as something of an outlier on their new album, it remains a rather beautiful number from this fast-rising band.

Compared to previous singles, it’s a laugh, and someday, it does possess more of the classic shoegaze elements, like delicious on the ear dream-state vocals and reverb-heavy guitars. haunted house does follow their theme at times, however, with a post-punk bass line and sharp synths giving the track edges and eddies where you’d expect yielding, flowing streams of noise.  

“haunted house is what I’d consider our only true shoegaze song, though shoegaze elements find their way into our songs just because we’re such huge fans of the genre,” says band member James Abercrombie. “When I wrote it, I was thinking about this great Lee Hazlewood song, Won’t You Tell Your Dreams. It’s about how he can’t stop dreaming of an old love.”

“It has this really haunting vibe to it. We’re also really into haunted houses and carnival dark rides and anything in that realm… Karla listens to a lot of ghost story podcasts. Our daughter has ghost hunting equipment and takes it with her to old places. I tend to be a little on the skeptical side, but I am coming around.

I really love ghost stories where spirits are doing something routine, like getting their morning coffee. There’s something really interesting to me about the memory of someone being so strong that it feels palpable, like it’s inhabiting your space and haunting you. Karla had the idea to make the vocals at the end sound super ghostly, which I think really adds to the spookiness of the track.”

Adds Abercrombie about the upcoming album, “We recorded our album over two weeks with Damon Moon (Bathe Alone, Sleepers Club) at his studio Standard Electric Recorders in Atlanta. Damon was awesome to work with.”

“We spent a ton of time just talking about music the three of us love and sharing songs back and forth. We’d name some obscure part of a song as a reference, and he’d get it immediately and dial in the tones perfectly. Damon also played drums and percussion on the album. The three of us produced it together, and it was all really collaborative and fun.”

silk daisys are Karla Jean Davis and James Abercrombie, and you can find the Atlanta-based duo on Instagram for all the latest album updates. You can hear their music on Bandcamp, Spotify, and YouTube Music.