Stream: Launder, ‘Powder’

Kevin Bronson on November 13th, 2018

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With the release of the “Pink Cloud” EP earlier this year, Launder — aka singer-songwriter John Cudlip — joined the legion of current indie heroes etching emotional vignettes out of fuzzy guitar swells and laid-back vocals.

The new single “Powder,” which will be out as a 7-inch on Jan. 18, is exemplary — a slice of unvarnished melancholy directed at the songwriter’s childhood friends who suffer from substance abuse. “Your eyes in front of me / They look so dead / Pretend you never cared at all,” Cudlip sings as swirls of acoustic and electric guitar form a soft-focus picture of his frustration. “I wrote this song about a group of friends I grew up who took the same path as me with a different outcome,” he says. “It’s the first song I’ve used an acoustic guitar on, something I think really fell in line with the vulnerability that fueled me through the writing process. The song as a whole fell into place naturally… Most of the lyrics coming into being along the way in the studio.”

Like Launder’s previous releases, it was produced by Jackson Phillips (Day Wave) and features DIIV’s Zachary Cole Smith on guitar and Lukas Frank on drums. A Launder full-length is in the works.

||| Stream: “Powder”