Check Out Crown of Pity’s Exciting New Heavy Shoegaze Track Exclusively Right Here

The Philadelphia band Crown of Pity’s new song “Perfect Moontan” quickly proves an excitedly triumphant track. The selection comes from their upcoming new album just, which will be available May 3. The band push contemplative shoegaze sensibilities to fascinating extremes, invigorating their ultimately still gentle music with a rousing intensity that ensures it’ll stick around, looping in your mind long after the songs finish playing. Get an exclusive first listen to “Perfect Moontan” below.

The song features an especially powerful presentation, hitting the ground running with strong but smooth vocals and music and only getting more poignant from there. There are multiple vocal lines at play at times, which adds to the interesting, building texture. Both guitarist David Dutton and bassist Natalie Rakes contribute on that front. Their music takes the listener along for a vividly imaginative journey — the sense on this particular track is that of laying in the moonlight with some possibly romantic interest.

Lyrically, they share a story of gradually easing into the subtly potent environment, with the refrain that someone “gave into emptiness and smiled” sticking out as an emotional anchor. Their gradually building, straightforward music supports this concept pushing the listener further and further into a physical experience thanks to increasingly prominent melodic jumps before breaking off around the midway point in what feels like an attempt to let the music do the talking. They let their catchy, swirling guitar and bass melodies have the floor for a significant period that really helps define the track as reaching beyond the bounds of more directly conventional songwriting.

Their music feels experiential, distilling a towering portion of complicated love and loss into something at least somewhat more palatable. Their music is conscientiously beautiful, growing on the listener and asking for a little time rather than putting all of what it’s got to offer out at once.

Crown of Pity would likely appeal to fans of a wide variety of “alternative” music, operating in a sonically pretty unique space. They touch on a whole range from meditative, completely ethereal post-rock to more direct tunes that are pretty much meant to be catchy in the first place, and they bring these diverse and sometimes competing threads together quite marvelously.

Listen to “Perfect Moontan” below and check out Crown of Pity’s Bandcamp page for album pre-orders.