oceanically woozy indie art rock –

Avantide deliver the rare capacity to melodically unfray your nerves while sating even the most voracious appetite for indie art rock aesthetics in Sleep It Off, a track that moves as the mellifluous, oceanically woozy equivalent to hitting the ground running with their LP Keep Running. Formed in Bismarck by down-to-earth music fans who met in a record shop and built a band from shared obsessions, they turned their rise into a slow-burn trail of shows, collaborations and studio hours that shaped the sonic tides they steer through now. Sleep It Off embodies that rhythmic sublimity; the Strokes-y twitch of nostalgia dissolves into cascades of timbre carved from artsy garage rock licks that gently warp the air around them.

The semi-lucid sentimentality of the definitively indie vocals hushes reverie into the kind of recognition you yearn for, a tender understanding and carressive caring that sits beside your idiosyncrasies and self-destructive tendencies without flinching. It is a track for the lovers who wear their hearts on their sleeves next to the culture that keeps them stitched together. Their record shop spawning starts to make all the sense here. To boot, few bands that take influence from the likes of Pavement reach this affectingly experimental place, affirming Avantide as a dying breed that I am going to be inseparable from this LP until the summer.

For this LP, Avantide shaped their material through a process rooted in friendship and persistence, from acoustic skeletons in Mandan rehearsal rooms to full-band arrangements refined alongside engineer Tyler Pilot at Red Dot Recording. Their LP Keep Running has so far earned praise from The Pentatonic and Obscure Sound while landing them shows with Dakotah Faye, The MoonCats and Stephen Steinbrink.

Sleep It Off is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast