Great Grandpa – “Bloom”

Great Grandpa – “Bloom”

Great Grandpa’s debut album Plastic Cough was good enough to earn them a spot on our Best New Bands Of 2017 list. But with their new album Four Of Arrows, the Seattle band are seriously leveling up. Lead single “Mono No Aware” and its follow-up “Digger” were both fantastic. Now they’re sharing a new song called “Bloom,” and it’s just as good.

“I get anxious on the weekends when I feel I’m wasting time/ But then I think about Tom Petty and how he wrote his best songs when he was 39/ Say I’m young enough to change/ Please say I’m young enough,” lead singer Alex Menne pleads, before trying to convince themself that it’s possible: “Step into whatever you want to and let your spirit bloom.”

Vocalist-guitarist Pat Goodwin tells Nylon that his goals for the track were “to write a song for [bassist] Carrie [Goodwin] that combined many of her favorite genres/artists — ’90s pop-country, Tom Petty, Third Eye Blind, Taylor Swift, the Beatles, etc. — into something cohesive” and “to capture this elusive spirit present in many of Petty’s great songs, where the underlying melancholy emotion is gilded or masked by joyful melodies and arrangements then slowly revealed in the lyrics.”

In “Bloom,” he says, “the lyrics remain simple and almost naive, as if you’re giving yourself a half-hearted, almost cheesy motivational pep talk you’re not quite sure you fully believe.” The song is everything that this new version of Great Grandpa do so well, mixing sharp pop sensibilities with rootsy, emo-tinged indie rock and stretching into orchestral post-rock expansiveness in its majestic outro. Listen to it below.

Four Of Arrows is out 10/25 on Double Double Whammy. Pre-order it here.

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