Kevin Bronson on March 8th, 2022

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“Nobody Else,” the first new music from L.A. duo Golden Daze in three years, is a genteel folk-rocker about feeling untethered and longing for a time it wasn’t so. That’s often a recipe for melancholy, but here their lush harmonies ride to the rescue, mitigating the unease.

The duo — Ben Schwab and Jacob Loeb, who met at CalArts and have gone on to release two full-lengths — do indeed ride in director Gemma Warren’s video for the song, aimlessly road-tripping to the song’s acoustic guitars. Schwab and Loeb reveal their roots straightaway. “Traded the Midwest / For Arizona skies / Those who know you best / Left ’em all behind,” they sing, still “looking for somewhere that feels like back home.”

They explain: “The idea of ‘home’ and whether we understand it as a person or place, as something to seek out or something to return to, is kind of at the heart of ‘Nobody Else’ and is maybe the central theme to all the new material we’ve been working on.”

Golden Daze found their footing with their Laurel Canyonesque 2019 album “Simpatico,” but the pandemic threw them for a loop. “‘Simpatico’ posed a question that now we need to answer,” says Loeb, who has also been active in making a very different kind of music as the guitarist in L.A. quartet Kills Birds. “This new song feels like a bridge between that record and whatever comes next.”

||| Watch: The video for “Nobody Else”

||| Previously: “Took a Fall,” “Salt”