“High Road”- Cults

“Should’ve took the high road, now my days have all turned black,” vocalist Madeline Follin coos, squeezing through an airtight rhythm section on new Cults single “High Road”. The song still floats along with the same breeziness as the 60s girl-pop signposts the NYC-band swears by, but it’s more than just a musical buoyancy Cults share with “Myrmidons of Melodrama” The Shangri-Las. It’s a pained realization of the unknown. In “Remember (Walking in the Sand) Mary Weiss was struggling to recall the memories of the boy she once knew, “the boy who said he’d be true,” as a harrowing piano cast a shadow over her every recollection. Here Follin can’t find her own coordinates (“no one really knows whose house I’m in”) while a scrawling organ runs interference. When the high and low roads begin to blur together, an instrumental meltdown ensures Follin’s lost status. There’s not relationship cartography to map unchartered territories and Garmin doesn’t make a GPS to help you avoid heartache. Plotting a course in life it’s easy to lament a wrong turn you’ve taken, particularly when the way out is “such a long way back.”

Listen to the new single here and look for Static to drop on October 15 via Columbia.