Monday 1/4: Moontype—"Ferry"
Today, we share our thoughts on a recent song by the Chicago indie band Moontype.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him) and Eric Bennett (they/them). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. Now we’re, also a M-F newsletter about songs. Our format is simple: a link to a song and a short take from each of us about what we think of it. Each day of the week has a corresponding genre: Monday is indie, Tuesday is punk, Wednesday is hip-hop, Thursday is pop, and Friday is misc.
Today, we share our thoughts on a recent song by the Chicago indie band Moontype.
Moontype—“Ferry”
Eric Bennett:
Chicago’s Moontype are one of a few bands I recently learned about and am immediately rooting for. Their most recent single “Ferry” follows the tried-and-true format of quiet-then-loud, a format I am pretty easily grabbed by. The song’s chorus finds their vocalist Margaret McCarthy wishing to “take the ferry to Michigan” and escape where they are in life. These maritime lyrics mesh well with how the guitar riffs smash down like the waves of choppy water. The song just gets so big, and I honestly feel like I get lost inside it. I’d also recommend checking out the song’s incredible music video, which has exactly the kind of artistic sensibility you’d expect from a band that formed at Oberlin.
Eli Enis:
I like this Moontype song because it’s placid indie-rock with compositional intention. McCarthy’s voice straddles the restrained murmur of Lucy Dacus and the muted thrust of Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko, two singer-songwriters who also write songs that bubble and boil rather than steadily simmer. Beneath McCarthy’s vocals rests a puddly shoegaze crunch that doesn’t neatly pour over the sides so much as it is splashes and spills in response to the jostling nature of the song. Every component of the track feels part of the same whole but there’s a real organic movement to the performance that resonates more like a journey than an afternoon of aimless wandering. Thoughtful, sensitive, and sharp all at once.