Rising singer-songwriter Savannah Conley has announced her highly anticipated debut album Playing the Part of You Is Me to be released this May. The new album is a stirring distillation of the pleasures and problems of growing up, it brims with the keen insights and bold choices and is a sit-up-and-take-notice debut album. Love and doubt, grief and hope are all here, coiled into anthems for a new generation facing such feelings. 

Today, Conley is returning with a new single, “Don’t Make Me Reach,” along with a gorgeous new video. Conley tells us “‘Don’t Make Me Reach’ was written really quickly. I think I wrote it in ten minutes in a pretty desperate feeling moment. I felt very defeated and had nothing else to give to the situation I was in. The only guitar I had in the house at the time was an old acoustic that was missing a string that I tuned to some dumb alternate tuning and that song was the result.” 

She continues “This video was one of the last ones left to shoot. We were on a cold, rainy beach in Pornic, France, our speaker had died and we were freezing. This video was one take that captured the desperation of the song when it was written so perfectly. Right when we reached the end, the sun started peeking out of the clouds, and there couldn’t have been anything more fitting.”

This intense expressive dependence animates Playing the Part of You Is Me, the unspoken motivation inside songs that ring so emotionally true they may feel like scenes swiped from your own life, as the title aptly suggests. The core of these 11 numbers is new love and what it looks like when it starts to turn old. 

These songs feel like testaments from and directions to a new Nashville. Conley harnesses the incisiveness of Alvvays, the skywriting vulnerability of Death Cab for Cutie, and the tuneful charm of Lorde at once. Sure, there are bits of what you could call Americana here—candor, grace, detail. But these 11 pieces are all jolting reminders that those traits aren’t isolated to a form or term; they are simply marks of great songs, songs like these.