Softer’s latest track, ‘Cry, Laugh’, drifts in like a hazy memory, drenched in fuzz and flickering emotion. Built on glimmering guitar textures and woozy crescendos, the Los Angeles band takes the scaffolding of shoegaze and scribbles raw, aching poetry all over it.
From the start, the song feels like it’s stumbling through fog, with vocals that hover between understanding. “Some days seem like they’ll never end, And others feel like nothing,” they confess, capturing the emotional vertigo of depression without melodrama. The production mirrors that emotional blur- guitars smear into each other, drums pulse like distant thunder, and the spoken-word mantras about “the hills, the grass, the sun” hit like affirmations whispered mid-anxiety spiral.
Lyrically, ‘Cry, Laugh’ reads like a diary entry penned during a mushroom trip at dusk. It’s filled with the angst between surrender and control, memory and presence. The repeated invocation of “the poison root” doesn’t feel reckless, it’s a quiet dare to peel back the layers and face everything that spills out. Nostalgia, regret, laughter, tears- it’s all tangled together in the kind of chaos that somehow heals you.
What Softer nails is that feeling of being on the edge of something- not quite broken, but not quite whole either. Their sound channels the emotions of early 2000s indie rock (think Sunny Day Real Estate or American Football), but with the shimmering sonics of modern acts like Slow Pulp or Alvvays. It’s bedroom confessional meets west coast wide open, where internal storms meet coastal clarity.
‘Cry, Laugh’ offers motion: a run through the sun-soaked hills, a dive into cold Pacific water, a trip that leaves you cracked open and a little more alive.