Pink Cliffs are back with another gently sparkling new single that sounds like it’s been beamed in from a salt-flecked dream. Called “The Hope and Desperation of the Sea,” the song sounds like a lost postcard from a beach that’s a little too far gone to remember clearly distant, familiar, shimmering with warmth and ache at once.
At just under four minutes long, the single strikes a balance between hazy intimacy and the grandeur of something larger, like gazing at the ocean and feeling small, yet somehow understood. It’s built on the skeletal rattle of dusty-sounding drum machines and swathed in sun-bleached melodies that are as fragile and wistful as fading Polaroids. Dreamy octave harmonies hover above it all, voices heard on the sea wind.
There is a clear reverence here for vintage synth-pop, though Pink Cliffs’s newer spins feel a lot more weathered and personalized. If the Pet Shop Boys recorded a break-up record in a beachfront shack, but then handed the tapes over to Mac DeMarco to finish in his bedroom, the results might end up something like this. There’s an analog sincerity to the production every note sounds considered but never clinical, as if it was all captured in a single take during golden hour.
The song ponders natural, as well as emotional, forces beyond our control. There’s yearning woven into the track, the sort that can only be produced when you witness something beautiful float away just beyond your grasp.” It’s a hopeful and also a heartbreaking song, one that walks that line with rare elegance.
What keeps “The Hope and Desperation of the Sea” with me long after the final chord has finished sounding isn’t just its sonic texture although there’s plenty to lose yourself in there it’s the emotional honesty. Pink Cliffs can make a song that sounds like it could dissolve right into the mist at any second feel solidly, heartbreakingly human.
Connect with Pink Cliffs