Spunsugar Capture the Sugary Sweetness of Teenage Romantic Fantasies on the Self-Aware Dream Pop Single “White Sneakers”

On the surface Spunsugar’s glittery shoegaze single “White Sneakers” seems to be an offbeat love and lust song. But its melancholic tone with undercurrents of regret point to an interpretation of its unusual lyrics and imagery. Like a love song yearning for someone for whom you shouldn’t hold such feelings but earnest in its expressions though the sentiments as expressed sound like the words of someone inexperienced, naive and awkward and cast in terms that might seem unusual to anyone else but in your head they might make sense in the way of an unrequited fantasy of the kind that happen all the time in the teenage mind. And it’s that sensibility that Spunsugar captures here. Most people have had these kinds of thoughts and cinema and literature is not short on examples of people expressing that reality in all its awkwardly endearing and sometimes cringeworthy glory. In the music video the members of the band are seen walking around a rural or suburban Swedish landscape when all the green is gone and in the distance we see hints of neglected human dwellings and vehicles while the the vocalist sometimes hangs around a rusted out football goal. And there’s something very self-aware and sentimental about this aesthetic captured in an image quality like something from a camcorder recording. Like having a fondness for a place and time in spite of yourself because of how genuine the feelings are in those moments in your memory and how the reality of it isn’t as romantic as you remember for anyone else and yet it doesn’t quite matter in the living it and in the enjoying of revisiting those feelings knowing how silly it might be. Apparently the song started as a cover of “Carrie” by Europe but definitely sounuds nothing like that now minus maybe some of the synth tone but in context that is the perfect origin story for the song. Watch the video for “White Sneakers” on YouTube and follow Swedish shoegaze/dream pop band Spunsugar at the links below. The song appears on the group’s new album A Hole Forever which landed November 17, 2023 via Adrian Recordings.