Endearments – Queen City Sounds and Art

Listening to Endearments’ “Hazy Eyes” and watching its performance music video is reminiscent of going to see shows in warehouses and DIY spaces in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The music is well-crafted dream pop with gorgeously minimal synths, inviting rhythms and vocals with a soft but emotionally rich immediacy. The lyrics are an unconventional love song where there are words about how normally feeling so close with someone and welled up with excitement often involves the kinds of substances people take to feel open to others but with a certain someone special that feeling is persistent and requires no indulging anything but honest feelings. There could be a layer of irony in the song but it just has a refreshing earnestness that makes it immediately accessible and with a freshness of spirit that pulls you in. But those projections on the band in the video of colored patterns and early video art really taps into a specific resonance of nostalgia but without the baggage of being overly sentimental. There’s an unvarnished quality to it that gives it a home made feel that makes anyone remember what it was like to go to shows at unconventional venues where someone would do visuals for all the bands and make it special on a low budget and how there was more a feeling of togetherness and community to that that hasn’t happened as much in the past several years in many places. Endearments makes it feel like we can have that again somewhere, some time with people who want to experience that again and for the first time which plays into the spirit of the song. It’s a whole package. Watch the video for “Hazy Eyes’ on YouTube and follow Endearments at the links provided. The group’s new EP It Can Be Like This dropped on November 3, 2023.

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Endearments have tapped into a certain aesthetic of 1980s New Wave/synth pop sound for its single “Too Late.” That mix of lush, atmospheric melodies, soulful vocals, soft but finely accented percussion and palm muted guitar followed by elegant and minimal leads giving definition to the more ethereal synths. That sound is suited well to nuanced takes on the complex interpersonal politics of relationships especially those that have fallen apart in ways that leave at least one of the people hurt and confused until they sort out what it is they wanted all along and more importantly what they don’t want. In this song when Kevin Marksson sings “That is not the way to love me at all” it’s a declaration of self-worth. The earlier part of the song describes the awkward conversations in which the person who has transgressed against the formerly shared trust of the relationship tries to explain themselves with excuses that amount to insults by way of rationalizations. The perspective of the song seems to be an interesting emotional place of having gone beyond the initial hurt and pondering what went wrong to embracing what’s best instead of what once was but is now broken. It’s an important psychological turning point for anyone that’s been in a relationship gone awry and essential for moving on to better places in one’s own heart and perhaps better recognizing earlier when things won’t work out. There are a lot of love songs, a lot of break-up songs, a lot of songs about missing someone, a lot sitting in a place of anger and betrayal but this one is about loving yourself and being adult and we could use more of that sort of framing in pop music. Fans of Washed Out and Future Islands will appreciate the sounds and sentiments in this song. Listen to “Too Late” on Spotify and follow Brooklyn-based Endearments at the links below.