“It’s impossible to talk about anything without putting it in the context of the world right now,” Says Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards on the band’s new album Better Dreaming, “Making art in this day and age for me is a battle for focus…we’re in an age of interruption…but you absolutely need to focus in order to go deep into music”. Yet, distraction, depression, and heartbreak reign supreme in 2025. “Fight Fascism with Trash Music”, was a working title that Garbus and bandmate/partner Nate Brenner were previously considering. Though they eventually chose to call the album Better Dreaming, it still proudly waves an anti-fascist, liberation, freak flag. And it’s effing fun – some of Tune-Yards smoothest, funkiest, and most direct pop music to date, and yes, you can dance to it. And when you do dance to it, be prepared to sweat out something that’s been long stuck inside, and pretty deep down.
The songs of Better Dreaming came to Garbus and Brenner with unusual ease. They asked themselves what would happen if they simply let the songs come out, following any trail they wished – first thought, best thought style. There was a strong desire to move, to make music that would enter the ear and immediately loosen up the joints, get the whole body wiggling. After covid-isolation, and time away from touring and live shows, the desire to be moved by music was undeniable. The insane experience of growing an actual human being influenced this as well. Garbus and Brenner’s 3-year-old can be heard singing on “Limelight”. The song was born from dancing together as a family to George Clinton. The kid liked the demo so much that whenever Garbus and Brenner tried to push the track forward with a new version or edit, he would demand the first version. Thus the infectious, effortless original groove stayed true.
The rhythms throughout the rest of the record carry this freshness as well, with deep pockets full of subtle idiosyncrasies that stem from Tune-Yards’ return to making an album primarily as a duo. All but one of these songs are built around Merrill’s drum looping and rhythm building, as they were on some of the early albums like Bird-Brains and W H O K I L L – no full kit drummer here, and the songs love it. The album’s opening track “Heartbreak” builds huge chords of Garbus’ vocal harmony around a fat slow-jam beat full of clicks, pops, samples, and dubbed snares. Garbus, soulful as ever, sings of heartbreak as fuel, as a challenge. In the world of Better Dreaming, a lyric like, “Watch me survive another heartbreak” hits like a call to action. The four-on-the-floor pump-up jam, “How Big is the Rainbow” drips with disco-house, queer-club, anthemic strobe energy, and delivers a message to those who don’t yet understand what this means. “Do you feel a hate inside your heart? Do you feel a hatred start to grow? Just know that it’s hate that lets you know just how much further your heart has to go.”
Better Dreaming is ferocious in its invocation of self-love, of collective action, of dance floor liberation, ego-death deliverance, and a future we could all thrive in. When diving into the present darkness of the world, Tune-Yards asks themselves how much literal energy and joy can be conjured and pumped through the music. In its life-affirming art-pop of the apocalypse, Better Dreaming comes true.
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