Canadian synth-pop quartet Alvvays have followed up on "In Undertow" with "Dreams Tonite": the second glimpse of their upcoming sophomore album Antisocialites (which will be out on September 8). Lead vocalist Molly Rankin is still preoccupied with a failed relationship, but this time she looks back at the past instead of the future. The track's 1980s pop-leaning instrumentation dials down on the band's typically fuzzy strings to present a sublimely pristine and dreamy melody, which serves as a perfectly bittersweet backdrop for a chorus that repeats one melancholically romantic question: "If I saw you on the street, would I have you in my dreams tonight, tonight?"
The dreaminess is amplified by Rankin's stoic-yet-delicate vocals, which couches the doomed romance in figurative language: 'Live your life on a merry-go-round/ Who starts a fire just to let it go out?'. The opening verse includes one detail that grounds the doomed romance in a specific geographic and temporal reality: 'Rode here on the bus/ Now you're one of us/ It was magic hour/Counting motorbikes on the turnpike/ One of Eisenhower's'. After this vivid rendering, Rankin takes off on her whimsical tangent, contrasting the song's blissful production with an unflinching acceptance of what was not meant to be:
'Don't sit by the phone for meWait at home for me, all alone for meYour face was supposed to be hanging over me like a rosarySo morose for me; seeing ghosts of me; writing oaths to meIs it so naive to wonder...'
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