2018 saw Connecticut group Ovlov return with TRU, their first album in five years. They’re not taking as long between albums this time, though, as Buds is set for release in November. They announced the project last month, and today, they share a new preview of it, “The Wishing Well,” which sounds like a not-too-distant relative of early-2000s Death Cab For Cutie.
The band’s Steve Hartlett told Stereogum the song is about “how much I dislike the way some people respond to something a person with mental health issues might have done wrong, whether it be cops, all the way to the employees at your favorite ‘DIY’ venue in Brooklyn, NY.”
He also spoke about the nature of the new album, saying, “I definitely feel like this album is a bit poppier than anything else we’ve released. Hoping that pays off literally and figuratively [laughs]. […] I’ve just always loved pop music. I always felt like Ovlov was pretty poppy in general. Everything can always be poppier in my opinion. I don’t know. I just wanted this one to be different than the first two. There’s definitely some songs on there that don’t sound like Ovlov songs to me, but we made them that way. We made them sound as Ovlov as possible.” On that front, he described “The Wishing Well” as “a bit out of our realm.”
Listen to “The Wishing Well” above.
Buds is out 11/19 via Exploding In Sound. Pre-order it here.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.