We last wrote about Santa Barbara indie rock outfit The Phone Booth back in 2019 with the release of their debut album, Roman. “An album about loss, yes,” we described of the record, “but more than that […] a testament to the quiet joy of friendship.” With poignant sincerity and great luminous crescendos, Roman was both heartbreaking and uplifting, managing to depict “reality in all of its human depth and fervour, a desperation that will never end, impermanence as the everlasting experience.”
Back with their first music since the record, The Phone Booth have just put out a brand new single, ‘Happier at Home’. Very much following in the spirit of the previous record, the song is a morose creeper of tune, dragging itself reluctantly through the slow opening half with a mixture of disinterest and foreboding. “Embracing the stable life,” sings lead Michael Easbey, capturing the contemporary mood in a few simple lines. “I’m polishing shoes at night / The walk is an easy thought / But in practice it’s not.”
The temptation is read into the single as a COVID tune, and the timing is certainly notable in that respect, be it by design or coincidence. But the truth is that ‘Happier at Home’ is about something deeper than any one crisis, a more general malaise made all the more apparent by the pandemic. The tortured cocktail of emotions that is life under the conditions of late capitalism. Its cruel, paradoxical state. A deep boredom, a constant anxiety, the pressure to live a certain way met with the equal and opposite terror of betraying one’s self in order to see it through. The relief of acting against the expectations, the guilt that never leaves you alone.
Thought I was always missing something
Well I’m happier at home
Stealing the notes that all cascade from them
Without you when you’re gone
Sealing the notice from the table
Who says I’m better off?
Gather the one pure outcome I glean when I kill my thoughts