MTL's Prism Shores Releases Youthful Dream Pop Track "Tennis Shoes"
Prism Shores. Photo courtesy of Paul Atwood
Days away from the release of their debut album Inside My Diving Bell, Montreal-via-Charlottetown indie-poppers Prism Shores have released their latest single “Tennis Shoes”. Staying true to the band’s sonic influences of dream pop and shoegaze, the track sketches ponderances of malaise and angst that glide us perfectly into the fall’s chill.
Speaking to the track’s deeper construction, vocalist, guitarist and keyboardist Jack Mackenzie shared:
“It’s one of the oldest songs on the record, [and] we’ve been playing it live since about 2019. It’s one of the more mid-tempo moments on the album; our attempt at making a more sensitive track, inspired by both the angstier side of 80s UK indie on labels like Sarah Records and the 90s dream pop of bands like Luna, Pale Saints, Cocteau Twins, and Slowdive. It’s built around a rhythm section of bass, drums, and guitar tracked live to tape. Atop that are some 12-string guitar overdubs and two interweaving, droning lead parts by our guitarist Nathan [Cann] that really cement the atmospheric qualities of this track. The lyrics, like most songs on the record [Inside My Diving Bell, out September 23], take a reflexive, maybe navel-gazing approach. This record is like a coming-of-age document; the lyrics on this song find me wrestling with the more uncomfortable emotions and headspaces I found myself in heading towards my early twenties, feeling a sense of inertia or listlessness and wanting a change.”
The brooding uncertainty of “Tennis Shoes” offers a further taste of what is to come with Inside My Diving Bell, complementing the youthful insecurity of its previous singles “Acrobat” and “Diving Bell”. The rest of the record promises to deliver higher recording fidelity and new musical avenues for Prism Shores, all while balancing with its beloved sense of shambolic character through the natural energy of its live-off-the-floor bed tracks.
Recorded throughout the pandemic at Halifax’s Ocean Floor Recording, Prism Shores teases Inside My Diving Bell as a “scrappy, yet carefully considered proof of concept” — as the band contends with late-adolescent directionality and experiments with sonic depth, their debut full-length LP pledges to chart a promising course that is bound to resonate.
Stream “Tennis Shoes” below!
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