Back in June we introduced Detroit supergroup Touch the Clouds with single ‘Feeling Light‘. “Equal parts pop and punk,” we wrote, “the band combine the energy of post-hardcore with the invention of space rock, allowing infectious harmonies and vast ambient textures to coexist within the same song.”
In preparation for a full-length album, the group have been steadily releasing a stream of singles over recent months. ‘Gordie and the Cruisers’ is the latest of these, a track which utilises the inventive and nuanced Touch the Clouds sound to explore themes equally complex. Because while on the surface the bright, anthemic tone recreates the abandon of youth in all its vivid joy, there are more ambiguous threads too. A study on retrospection itself, calling attention to the artifice of memory and the rose-tinted fictions it has us believe.
What results is a song which offers cathartic crescendos with one hand and punctures them with the other. Choosing to interrogate its own escapism, and thus resist the dead end of nostalgia. “Are we going back to visit the past?” as the opening line asks. “Are we on that path to nowhere?”
we were driving away as fast as we could
with a hand in the air like a sail, as sunlight set
speed was bending the trees at the edge of the road
young and on fire, yet lifeless