The Singles Bar: Dusky Grey go for an invigorating ‘Joy Ride’

Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.

There are some songs that burn you from the inside out. You inhale, letting it flow through your veins, pumping each cell with verve, turning her fingertips red. Dusky Grey‘s new blissful track “Joy Ride” is such an excursion. It’s tempered with acoustic and electric guitars, which trade off like a set of bumblebees scuttling in the breeze. “I’m blind, you got me where I don’t wanna be,” vocalist Gethin Williams discloses, an uneasiness flaking his delivery, “in a homeless room, I can’t leave / I don’t feel the love / I see ya, I can’t speak / I don’t know where it’s gonna lead / And I’m hopeless for you.”

The song ⎯⎯ written “about being at a house party growing up and the way everyone tries to fit in, and tries to conform to peer pressure and do things they normally wouldn’t want to do, to look cooler than they are,” bandmate Catrin Hopkins explains ⎯⎯ builds on Alessia Cara’s alluring “Here” proclamation, centered on social constructs and longing to break free. “When you dive and you drown and you wanna get out, do you swim? Are you happier now all your demons out? Do you really think?” Hopkins later prompts on the bridge, escaping into unrelenting waves of slaps and flickers. From its starched house-lite to the pair’s delicate vocal dance, “Joy Ride” is a crisp, perfectly-ironed pop accessory, ripe for the impending summer months and breezy trips down the sandy coastline.

“So tell me, tell me we don’t need this / I gotta see it on your lips / The vertigo where we live / Surrounded by this fake bliss,” they sing, imprinting their new-found independence on the song’s DNA, wiggling its way between your ears. Dusky Grey are what truly great, delicious pop music is made of ⎯⎯ and we’ll always be here for it.

Grade: 3.5 out of 5

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Photo Credit: Jenna Foxton

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