As much fun as summer may be, with all the glorious weather and the cook-outs and young romance and freedom that defines it, becoming nostalgic over the season is just as beloved. There’s something almost intoxicating about looking back at a span of just a few months, making something truly grand over a slight bump in the thermostat and a little extra leisure time, even when other life-changing and truly memorable events can happen in the rest of the year.
Our shared adoration of summer explains why beach-inspired acts from Beach House to Best Coast to Wavves to Surfer Blood to The Soft Pack and beyond are so popular. Their odes to ’60s surf-rock encapsulates a lot of our dreamy-eyed wonderment toward the warmest of all seasons. But while those bands celebrate a perpetual summer, Summer Camp are the band who has truly made summer a thing of obsession, something to be yearned for and remembered with an air of sweet remembrance. For them, summer is almost always long past, but never far from reach.
Comprised of London-based duo Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey, Summer Camp first rode to Internet notoritety by being rather mysterious. Their first collaboration together, a cover of “I Only Have Eyes For You”, gained some buzz, which the band immediately used to release their well-received Young EP. But uncertainty, as mesmerizing as it may also be, can only last so long, and the band have since opened up as to their intentions with the upcoming release of their debut full-length, Welcome To Condale.
“Welcome To Condale is our love letter to the days of being a teenager,” the band said in press for the 12-track LP, “when everything is So Important, and you’re transformed irrevocably by a miserable relationship with a spotty youth called Darren who works at Pizza Hut. We believe that you never really escape that time, for better or for worse. It’s the things you fall in love with then that will stay with you forever. Well, except Darren. Hopefully.”
That painful yet joyous inability to let go (or maybe it’s an ability to hold on) is the basis for tracks like “I Want You”, available below, and “Better Off Without You” (streaming here). The former is a synth-drenched call to an object of lust, from a girl or entity using the emergence of summer to parallel her own debut as a full-grown sexual creature with needs and wants. The latter is once more a child of ’80s music, but this time with a decidedly pop lean that calls foul on a love that just weeks ago shone brighter than any sunny day. Together, these cuts paint a portrait of a band in love with the single underlining idea that summer represents: that magic of the world around us and how truly meaningful and powerful each day is.
“Better Off Without You” is scheduled to be released on September 13th. Welcome To Condale hits stores on November 8th via Summer Camp’s own Apricot Records/Moshi Moshi Records.
Welcome To Condale Tracklist:
01. Better Off Without You
02. Brian Krakow
03. I Want You
04. Losing My Mind
05. Summer Camp
06. Nobody Knows You
07. Down
08. Welcome to Condale
09. Done Forever
10. Last American Virgin
11. Ghost Train
12. 1988
