On a warm and crisp new album, the Texas indie-pop duo takes up the mantle of adulthood while remaining preoccupied with the nature of memory and longing.
There’s an unnamable edge to memory, an agitating pleasure in reviving the thorniest parts of our past. To remember what’s painful, or banal, is to protect against the slog of the present, the mundanity of growing up. It’s within this blurry psychological terrain that indie-pop duo Hovvdy thrive. Will Taylor and Charlie Martin sing longingly of what’s lost and what remains, of the small moments that can epitomize a life: driving alongside your significant other in silence, watching YouTube videos in bed, playing catch with your friends in the front yard. This may sound like typical indie-rock adolescent fetishizing, but the candid reflexivity in Hovvdy’s songwriting and instrumentation guards against oversentimentality. They’re not stuck in the past; they’re moving forward, craning their necks back to see what’s been left behind.
On their fourth album, True Love, Taylor and Martin tame the tremors of youth by embracing their adult commitments. “Even though it’s hard to/I will surely move along,” goes a line on the album’s opener, “Sometimes,” summoning a mantra I’ve likely employed a dozen times over the last year. On “One Bottle,” Taylor laments the distance he feels from his partner while he’s on the road: “If it rings you know it’s me/Talking, words can’t tell you how I miss you.” Even when Hovvdy root into the present, the memory of easier times infects their experience, staining the songs with sanguine ambience. True Love doesn’t so much shirk nostalgia as recontextualize it, transfiguring well-worn memories from longings into lessons, a soil from which to potentially grow.
In a quasi-departure from the lo-fi minimalism of 2016’s Taster and 2018’s Cranberry, True Love flaunts a more dappled and spirited production, an enthusiastic verve also heard sporadically on 2019’s Heavy Lifter. Co-produced and engineered by Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver), True Love is full of joyful piano and bright acoustic guitars, a soundscape as crisp and lush as a beer on a late summer’s night. Often, Hovvdy use these warm backdrops as canvases to explore personal growth. “Hue,” an ode to Taylor’s newborn daughter, revels in the insecurity of parenthood: “Am I strong enough for two?/Can I love me like I love you?” On “I Never Wanna Make You Sad,” Martin tries to “lift up” his partner from the depths of his own low. In Hovvdy’s world, vulnerability is cherished and honesty is paramount, though a refrain of “we’ll be alright” or “I love you so much” usually resolves any lingering tension.
This relentless optimism can get distracting. A captivating discomfort lingers on the periphery of Hovvdy’s best work—a knack for locating obscure, difficult feelings, like the placid disillusionment of Heavy Lifter’s “Ruin (my ride)” or the blistering self-pity on Cranberry’s “Brave.” On True Love, generalization occasionally replaces emotional acuity; sing-along hooks substitute for more daring forays into sound or subject. And while Taylor and Martin’s earworm melodies and vocal charisma are satisfying, the record’s resolutory definitiveness sacrifices the delightful ambiguity found throughout their catalog.
One of the album’s strongest moments arrives near the end, on “Junior Day League.” Driving through the country, Taylor shakes off his reticence and finds nostalgia in the present, making meaning out of what’s right in front him: “How you move so patiently, feel your light fade into me/Turn into a memory.” Hovvdy are still craning their necks back to the past, but on True Love they cruise the open road, porous and wide-eyed in the face of new beginnings.
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