Bloom Parade wrote and produced their new single ‘By Another Name’ themselves, at home in Alderley, and you can hear the decision-making in every bar of it — nobody in a control room telling them to tighten the second verse or bury the lap steel. The Brisbane five-piece release the track on 14 August via GYROstream, and Backseat Mafia has it first: it’s the clearest turn yet in a drift that’s been happening in plain sight across their last few singles, away from the tighter architecture of emo, toward something with more room in it.
Earlier singles ‘When You Talk About Love’ and ‘Pop Song’ still had emo’s fingerprints on the phrasing — vocal lines that pushed, choruses that arrived on schedule. ‘By Another Name’ doesn’t push. Craig Johnson’s lap steel sets the temperature early and Mitchell Manz sings into that space rather than over it, which changes what the song is allowed to do: linger on a line, let a chord sit a beat longer than expected, trust that the feeling doesn’t need underlining. Dave Parker and Jesse Clarke keep the low end unhurried, and Dan Pimm’s guitar work fills gaps instead of announcing itself. It’s a band choosing patience as a technique, not a mood.
The song’s subject is the kind of love that keeps changing shape without becoming a different thing — the version that has to be renamed occasionally just to stay recognisable, worn down in one season and stubborn again in the next. It’s not a new idea in songwriting, but Bloom Parade earn it by refusing to resolve it too cleanly; the arrangement keeps circling rather than closing.
The guitars are crystalline, the vocals studied and cool, a slight sardonic delivery as they carry a soaring melody in an unashamedly antipodean flavour – I don’t need perfect, I don’t need clean. There are touches of Paul Kelly, and even, overseas, Band of Horses:
‘By Another Name’ is out 14 August via GYROstream.
Bloom Parade play Sunblushed Sounds on 12 September (tickets here). If this is where the band’s twang-curious phase settles, it’s a good address — the song trades none of the emotional directness that got them here, it’s just found a slower way of saying it.
