Summer Like the Season Unveils Sunny, Dreamy Tune “Wakey” (premiere)

With “Wakey”, Detroit-based electronic/art rock quartet Summer Like the Season has delivered a tune that perfectly fits their name. Replete with staccato beats and lilting synth parts, Summer Krinsky’s supple vocals weave their way throughout the sound collage. Amid instrumental starts and stops, the song unfurls in a sprawl across borders before snapping back into a chorus surging with urgency.

At once dreamy and soothing, it conjures the feeling of floating on your back in the middle of a lake at sunset. Krinsky pushes her vocals to acrobatic limits, from glass-fracturing highs to a warmer low end, signing the mantra-like refrain of “It’s time to sleep / I’m wide awake in a daze”. Mingling with weird harmonies, breakbeats, and, toward the middle, a throbbing bass, the ethereal soundscape has a bizarro pop vibe calling to mind early Björk.

Krinsky, a classically trained pianist who began playing guitar and bass at 12, formed Summer Like the Season as a solo project in 2014, wherein she wrote, recorded, produced, and mixed everything herself.

“I’ve always felt that mixing music is like mixing paints,” Krinsky said. “The outline of an image is what gives it distinction but the colors and shading is what gives it nuance. From an early age, having control of the mix was a crucial part of realizing the textures in my music. The only element I could never quite control were the drums. I would program complex parts and teach them to musicians to play live, but it was the one aspect that held me back from having power in my own sound. Drums are loud, bold and unapologetic, traits I felt necessary to embrace in every aspect. Over the last few years I began practicing with an ardent dedication.”

On this path, Krinsky met future bandmates Tasha Peace, Scott Murphy, and Sam Naples.

“The last few years have been a wild journey, putting out a new EP, working on a new album and touring as a full band,” Krinsky continued. “In a daze, I was reflecting on the importance of the autonomy that I feel drumming has given me and the complicated web of experiences that directed my path to becoming a drummer. I kept revisiting these vague blurry memories of this jungle-painted hand drum I had loved as a kid.”

“Wakey” is the fruit of those reminiscences.

The song is “about sleeplessly flipping through my rolodex of memories along my path to honing the command of a sound.”

Summer Like the Season issued their previous release, the four-song EP Thin Today, in October 2017. “Wakey” is to feature on a forthcoming album.