New Music: Sungaze – Always Looking Behind

Some bands operating within the shoegaze and dreampop genres go for a wall of sound. Cincinnati’s Sungaze, instead, gives us a wall of feeling, partly driven by loss.

Always Looking Behind is from the band’s upcoming I’m No Longer Afraid of Heights album and is one of those songs that isn’t so much a journey as it is the destination – or rather, a specific place in time.

That’s something Sungazer vocalist Ivory Snow goes into below, but Always Looking Behind looks at grief and growing, finding a specific time and place in her past, as her bandmates join her by creating a soundscape that is full of yearning and comfort but also threaded with pain. The lead guitar, especially, is like a lament for a funeral, tears transforming into notes of despair during Ian Hilvert’s solo.

It’s been a little over a year since my dad died, and sometimes, the smallest ripple of grief and regret can still hit me with the force of a tidal wave. That can hit harder when I visit home, and still see his slippers, the book he was reading.

I’m far from a child or young adult, like Snow was when she lost her father, but her words about the song and how loss can hit you hard in different ways and moments are ones I feel like I could have written about myself.

Says Snow, “My dad died a month after I turned 17. There were a lot of things in my childhood that forced me to grow up a bit quicker than I wanted to, but I’ve always seen his death as the biggest catalyst. In a way, this project and this part of me would not exist without that experience and the chain reaction it set off. It’s what led me to meet Ian [Hilvert, the band’s lead guitarist].”

“It got worse after my dad’s death, but I’ve always been a pretty nostalgic person and am well-acquainted with the feeling of missing something even before it’s gone, almost like a sort of pre-emptive or anticipatory grief.”

“Over time, I’ve found that this proclivity I have for losing myself to the past has prevented me from living fully in the present. I realized I didn’t want to someday reach the end of my life and look back only to see I missed everything because I was always looking behind.”

Snow continues, “I view this song as a conversation between my present-day self and the 17-year-old version of me who felt like her world was falling apart, like she was dying right alongside her favorite person. I wanted to allow her to tell her story, through her own lens.”

“Historically, it’s been a real challenge for me to find the balance between tapping into past experiences and being consumed by them. I think for a while I felt like it would be inauthentic to sing about things that happened and how I felt about them if I wasn’t still feeling that way.”

“So, I would drum up these past hurts and hold onto them, like clinging to embers from a dying fire with my bare hands. I’m slowly learning how to view the fire from a distance, how to draw upon its warmth without stoking it unnecessarily.”

I’m No Longer Afraid of Heights is the band’s fourth album, and is out on the 5th of April, in digital, vinyl, and cassette formats. Head to Softseed Music and Candlepin Records for pre-order details.

Always Looking Behind can be heard on Bandcamp, Spotify, and SoundCloud. For further listening options and details of upcoming live dates in Indianopolis and Cincinnati, head to Sungaze’s Facebook, or Instagram feeds.