Last year, Atlanta dream pop Rose Hotel released their debut LP, I Will Only Come When It’s A Yes. The songs draw on “a variety of influences,” we wrote in a preview, “from shoegaze to retro girl group,” and frontwoman Jordan Reynolds’s “burning spirit acts as the through line.” The lead single ‘Running Behind’ was the perfect example, an upbeat blend of country and rock twisted off-kilter in “a kind of Neutral Milk Hotel manner, Reynold’s vocals soaring and swooping within the clamour.”
Building on the success of the record, Rose Hotel is back with a brand new double single with Cold Lunch Recordings. Along with Tim Gratz (guitar, backing vocals), Vinny Restivo and Adam Weisberg (rhythm section), Reynolds weaves a sound that refuses to settle in any one place. There’s a nocturnal slink to the songs, a kind of foreboding simmer behind the country-inflected rock style, but there’s a paradoxical warmth too—something accentuated as both tracks were captured in analog and mastered to tape.
This duality extends to the themes, both singles caught between a desire for independence and an ever-lurking loneliness. Moving with a melancholic motion, ‘Drive Alone’ floats by like a night time drive, a previous relationship left in some other town, long having fallen out of the rearview mirror. “The interstate is empty, Highway 24,” goes the opening verse. “From Bowling Green to Atlanta looking to find more / of that freedom I’ve been searching for.” As more lines pass beneath the car’s wheels, and the space opens up between the past and the future, a newfound perspective emerges, leaving Reynolds to write some of her most searing lines yet.
And now I’m left to wonder, was it all for show
Did you really love me or did you just wanna know
How it felt to be inside a woman’s body and a woman’s mind?I just wanna drive alone tonight
‘The Constant’ is altogether more sinister, a tense and twitchy take on the perpetual flow of information, and the loneliness it reinforces. Just like the phenomenon it explores, the track flickers with volatility, threatening to rise to some final crescendo that never arrives. The result is constantly on edge, neither willing or able to look away.
Don’t try to fight it
It’s so inviting
The Constant
Drive Alone / Constant is out now via Cold Lunch Recordings and you can get it from the Rose Hotel Bandcamp page.