I have a tendency to fall into anecdotal rambling when I try to write about a project I find especially moving. This achilles heal is most inflamed when a song makes me cry – which does not happen super often – but when it does, I have to fight the urge to cite my own tears. It’s usually a desperate attempt to articulate the gravity of a track without turning to some dry technical dissection, but it doesn’t matter. No one gives a shit about the time I cried at my roommate’s roller blading competition, seated in a patch of grass above the park with Shallowater’s There is a Well in my ratty noise-cancelling headphones. So I will not tell you about it.

What I will say is that Houston based Shallowater is not doing anything new. At least not in a way I can cite on paper. Their soundscapes are familiar and rather organic, and I could write a laundry list of band comparisons ranging from emo and posthardcore to alt-country and slowcore, and they would all be valid. I suppose that is the real root of this apprehensive music journalism crisis I have so generously decided to include in this single review – the chasm between the abstractly unprecedented feel of a band and a reality that they are not technically doing anything unheard of. But perhaps that is the foundation for the most touching projects; an ability to pull from motifs seen countless times before and churn it into something that stops you in your tracks.

Today, Shallowater shared “Sadie”, the second single off their forthcoming record, God is Going to Give You a Million Dollars. The track starts on a gentle note, finding its footing in drawn out enunciations and a cautious rhythm section. As vocals grow in urgency, the soundscapes inflate into an eventual riff –lathered with mucky distortion, indulgent percussion, and a suffocating amount of poignancy. In the span of seven and a half minutes, Shallowater pursues this sort of escalation more than once, leaving you unsure of which buildup is the buildup. Perhaps the answer is neither? Perhaps the mud-slides of twangy sludge are less a destination than they are a means of amplifying slivers of delicacy and desperation between them. In the case of “Sadie”, soft vocals tend to cut deepest when they follow moments of sweeping cacophony. It’s enough to subdue even the sturdiest of poker faces.

You can listen to “Sadie” everywhere now, and pre-order God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars on Bandcamp.

Written by Manon Bushong