Austin TX’s Sun June has released “Easy Violence” and “John Prine,” a dreamy pair of new singles from their recently announced upcoming album, Bad Dream Jaguar, out October 20th via Run For Cover.

Sun June on “Easy Violence” & “John Prine”: “‘Easy violence’ is about the fears you become attached to and the mistakes you try to outrun. We’re talking peak White Horse 2013. The song started out as a demo we recorded at home. We liked the ‘voice memos’ feel and we ended up keeping the drum machine, guitars, synths, and the first-take vocals. We fleshed out the rest with the band in Dan Duszynski’s studio. For the video we got our friend Lauren Wilde to turn Laura into a jaguar for a staged photo shoot. It was fun to capture Laura begrudgingly surrender to a marketing campaign. The image of her driving through LA traffic alone with her makeup still on made us laugh — a hangover of self promotion.”

“‘John Prine’ is about appreciating something for the first time after it’s already over, and struggling to let it go. It’s also a shout out to my father who loves to say, ‘I’m not asleep, I’m just resting my eyes.’ The song was recorded in North Carolina by Alli Rogers and features Justin Morris (Sluice, Fust) on pedal steel. When Dan Duszynski mixed it he morphed the pedal steel into something more haunting and more ghostly (and more sleepy). We wanted the video to capture the feeling of coming down after a long night or a short visit with someone you miss, the kind of daze that’s a mix of longing and appreciation. I am not a morning person, but I really wish I were.”

Sun June’s music often feels like a shared memory – the details so close to the edge of a song that you can touch them. And as an Austin-based project, their music has also always felt strangely and specifically Texan – unhurried, long drives across an impossible expanse of openness, refractions shimmering off the pavement in the heat.

But on Bad Dream Jaguar, Sun June is unmoored. The backdrop of Texas is replaced by longing, by distance, by transience, and a quiet fear. The only sense of certainty comes from the murky past. It’s a dispatch from aging, when you’re in the strange in-between of yourself: there’s a clear image of the person you once were and the places you inhabited, generational curses and our families, but the future feels vast, unclear – and the present can’t help but slip through your fingers.

Colwell has an ear for restraint, for editing it down and embracing emptiness; Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy sounding in the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured foundation in a sense of ease. The layers on Bad Dream Jaguar don’t tangle they float, sheaths of divergent and luminescent sonics hanging together as the sun goes down, darkness seeping in.

Photo Courtesy: Alex Winker