House on the Hill is the emotional new track by the Americana-tinged dreampop band Sungaze, coming together with a beautiful, cinematic video of wintry DIY aesthetics.
With reverb at the forefront and deeply emotive vocals, Sungaze steers their dreampop sound in a slightly more accessible direction while staying true to their signature style.
On the single, the band's own Ivory Snow reveals: “It’s always interesting to see how your relationship to a song changes over time. When Ian first sent me the instrumental track on a rainy November night in 2023, I actually hated it. We were writing for our third album [Sungaze] at the time, and I remember just feeling like it wasn’t right at all. The next day, the melody was stuck in my head. The following day, some words began to form along with a vocal line. On the third day, I found myself driving around town with the song on repeat, singing different ideas over top. By the end of that drive, I had lyrics for the whole song.
“We probably did four or five recording sessions, just working on the vocals. I’ve definitely been known to be perfectionistic when it comes to this part of the process, but we came to a point with this one where we were just hitting a wall and needed to give it a rest. When we finally came back to it months later, Ian and I ended up reworking some of the lyrics and lines for the final chorus, to make it more repetitive and feel more like a song rather than the open-ended poem vibe it had initially. We recorded the final vocals the same day and I gave myself a limited number of takes, so I couldn’t overthink anything.”
ZR