“I’m really excited to release this album,” says Jarret Lee, lead singer of Vancouver indie rock band The Long War. Hearing the enthusiasm in Lee’s voice, it’s clear that he’s proud of his band’s new record. “We just mastered it and I really think we created something great.”
The album Lee is referring to is Under a Heavy Sky, The Long War’s second album after their much-buzzed-about debut, Landscapes.
When the band formed in late 2016, the five-piece found success quickly, winning the popular 2017 CBC Searchlight Contest. The following year they released their first record and afterward soon began writing Under A Heavy Sky.
On July 17th, the band released the music video for the album’s first single, “Endless Summer,” a catchy and joyful slow-burner that is surprisingly the result of some adversity the singer-songwriter experienced during the summer of 2018 in Vancouver.
“It was during a heatwave and I was going through a pretty bad failed relationship and was stuck in this mindset of loss,” he recalls. “It felt very traumatic and felt like whatever I was stuck in was just going to go on and on forever. It came from a very cathartic and therapeutic place.”
He says that the single is a great introduction to the new album, which he hopes will come out early next year.
“I want to show how we evolved as a band–I really wanted to showcase that,” he explains. “It demonstrates how we have sonically grown as a band and it really rounds out the album.”
Clocking in at just over five minutes, “Endless Summer” is the perfect summer anthem and like any good anthem, it has a chorus that remains in your head long after the sun sets on a hot day down at Wreck Beach.
While the single has very personal origins for Lee, he hopes that listeners will develop their own interpretation of the song, making the meaning their own.
“Once the song is out there in the world, it is no longer mine and it is going to take on a life of its own – it will mean something else to other people,” he says.
So does his ex know that we wrote a song about their breakup?
He laughs.
“I don’t think she does,” he says. “But I imagine that if she heard it, she might put the pieces together.”
