Rising New York-based outfit Colatura — Jennica (bass, vocals), Digo (guitar, vocals) and Meredith (guitar, synth, vocals) is a rising Brooklyn-based indie trio that features multiple lead singers while establishing a sound that’s sometimes dreamy and sometimes heavy, centered around pop-leaning melodies and post-punk atmospherics. And as a result, some critics have described them as “Fleetwood Mac with shoegaze guitars.”
With the release of 2018’s debut EP Spring Drew Blood and a handful of singles released in 2020, including “I Don’t Belong Here,” the Brooklyn-based indie outfit built up some buzz: They’ve been featured by The Deli and Oh My Rockness, and they’ve received breathless praise from Full Time Aesthetic, who covered a live show and wrote “the easiest way to describe Colatura is they’re like sunshine streaming out of an amplifier with its volume set at nine.” Adding to a growing profile locally, Colatura has played sets at Rough Trade, Baby’s All Right, Mercury Lounge and Elsewhere as well as house parties and DIY Brooklyn venues.
The band’s full-length debut, And Then I’ll Be Happy is slated for an April 22, 2022 release. Album single “Team Sport,” was released to breathless praise from the likes of BrooklynVegan and Under The Radar — with Under The Radar making references to Cocteau Twins, Alvvays and Yumi Zouma. And Then I’ll Be Happy‘s latest single “Kids Like Us” continues a run of gorgeous, nostalgia-inducing, 120 Minutes MTV-like dream pop featuring Meredith’s plaintive and yearning vocals, reverb-drenched guitars, driving rhythms and the band’s unerring ability to craft an enormous hook.
Seemingly drawing from personal and very lived-in experience, the song is rooted in bittersweet memories of a dysfunctional, flawed family — with the recognition that you’ll only have one, very screwed up biological family for better or for worse.
“This song is about collective family baggage, mental illness, and destructive patterns that can repeat generation after generation,” the band’s Meredith Lampe explains in press notes. “We wrote it from the perspective of one sibling calling another to remind them that they made a pact to never have kids in the hopes of cutting off the negative cycle and to stop passing down traits that they wish they didn’t have themselves.
The accompanying video was made by Phantom Handshakes‘ Matt Sklar and features the band performing over a college of footage from each band member’s childhoods, which fittingly gives the visual a bittersweet, nostalgic air.
