Stream: Dreamers, ‘Insomniac’

Kevin Bronson on April 8th, 2019

0

Plans change. Dreamers originally intended to release an EP trilogy as the follow-up to their 2016 full-length “This Album Does Not Exist.” They made it two-thirds of the way there in 2018, releasing “Launch” and “Fly.” But for the third EP in the series, the L.A.-via Brooklyn trio — singer-guitarist Nick Wold, bassist Marc Nelson and drummer Jacob Wick — found they had … too much, way too much.

So on April 26 they will release their second album, “Launch Dry Land,” 10 tracks of stadium-ready bombast mixed with alt-pop sugar highs. “Making this album was a really fresh way of doing things for me because we essentially had two years to keep writing and come up with as many ideas as possible,” bassist Marc Nelson says. “In the past it’s always been crunch time and a lot of deadlines, and I feel like having this type of a timeline allowed us to get deeply creative.”

Both new singles — “Insomniac,” with its muscular/sensitive swings, and “Die Happy,” with its kiddie-corps chorus — demonstrate the trio’s mastery of the current marketplace’s formulas, not to mention a keen awareness of sticking to relatable themes. With last year’s EP and the new album, those include break-ups and isolation. “‘Insomniac’ is about lying awake unable to sleep, unable to quiet the mind, caught in the spider web of doubts, loneliness and haunting memories,” main man Nick Wold says. “The first two EPs were all about this big breakup that I had been through and these new songs were written in the aftermath of that, so in a sense this album is really the sound of me discovering myself.”

||| Stream: “Insomniac”