Indie rock band The Lamps pen a tender love letter to their comfortable yet claustrophobic neighbourhood on new single This Town.
The Lamps have paid bittersweet homage to their hometown on their latest single This Town. Conceived by guitarist and lead vocalist Harrison Laver, the indie rock track explores the complexity of being back home and balancing both the stability and stagnation that comes with it. “You can’t take the town’s picture,” Laver sings in husky vocals atop brooding bass courtesy of Christian Selig, “but everyone knows the scene.”
Scott Holdridge’s nostalgic guitar strums and the steady percussion of Joe Krahling further flesh out This Town, until the track reads like a melancholic love letter to small towns and the difficulty of leaving them. The bittersweet sentiment is all wrapped up in This Town’s captivating strumming pattern, which adds a glistening-yet-pensive throughline to the track’s reflections on life as both “a dream and lecture.”
“I was also feeling a bit frustrated with the stagnant energy of the town I was living in, a feeling which I tried to convey in the song,” Laver said of This Town in a press statement. “As nice as my hometown is, everybody knows everybody, so it’s virtually impossible to be anonymous… On one hand, you have quiet, comfort, and predictability, but on the other you have lack of spontaneity, energy, and progression.”
An electric guitar sequence arrives towards the end of This Town where The Lamps combine their efforts for a blissful instrumental sequence to close out the track. There’s an all-encompassing quality to the single, which makes use of bluesy guitar riffs and the acoustic elements of surf rock for a sound that feels altogether distinct. This diversity can be attributed to The Lamps’ formation, having undergone multiple lineup iterations to arrive at their particular indie flair.
Hailing from San Francisco, founding bandmates Krahling and Laver first met as service industry workers before conceiving of The Lamps alongside their other band projects. Citing influences like The Flaming Lips and Interpol, the group released their debut EP Nervous Calm in 2018, and have shared a smattering of singles in the time since. The Lamps’ most recent effort Oddball arrived in January, following previous standalone tracks Minesweeper and Red 5.
Listen to The Lamps’ new single This Town below.
