We last featured Austin, Texas dream pop band Blushing back in September 2019, when we reviewed their self-titled album. The double husband and wife quartet—Michelle Soto (guitar, vocals), Jacob Soto (drums), Christina Carmona (vocals, bass), and Noe Carmona (guitar)—make songs “following in the footsteps of genre heavyweights My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins,” we wrote, “[combining] brooding shoegaze [and] melodic and texturally rich soundscapes that are capable of erupting into walls of cathartic noise.”
Blushing have now signed to Kanine Records and announced a new album, Possessions, which is due out early next year. In production since the release of the last record in 2019, the album is the product of an eventful gestation period, slowly growing in fits and starts, interrupted periodically by new births, freak winter blackouts and, of course, the global pandemic. What emerged was something that still sounds characteristically Blushing, but also different in many small aspects. A record the press release describes as “heavier in some ways and lighter in others […] embracing the spectrum of life and relationships while understanding the need for escape, whimsy and that dirty word, pop.”
In anticipation, the band have unveiled the lead single, ‘Blame’. The song features a very special guest in Miki Berenyi of UK shoegaze legends Lush, who was alerted to Blushing after they covered ‘Out of Control’. Berenyi’s influence, along with that of Mark Gardener (Ride) and Elliot Frazier (Ringo Deathstarr) who mastered and produced the album respectively, roots the single firmly in the hazy shimmer of the early nineties. A lush and immersive soundscape which invites the listener to submit to its ambiguous charms. As the repeated refrain at the end of the song suggests, “stick around, find out.”
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The song comes complete with a surreal video that proves the perfect accompaniment, so check it out below:
Possessions will be released on 18th February via Kanine Records and you can pre-order it now from the Blushing Bandcamp page.
