Sour Widows – “Staring Into Heaven/Shining”

Last month, Sour Widows announced their new album Revival Of A Friend. So far we’ve heard “Witness,” “I-90,” and “Cherish,” and today the Bay Area trio is releasing the cathartic single “Staring Into Heaven/Shining.”

“After my mom passed in late June of 2021, I went on a trip in August of that year in an attempt to put physical distance between myself and the pain of what I had just experienced,” Susanna Thomson explained in a statement. She continued:

I was searching for relief wherever I thought I could find it; ultimately, that trip taught me that grief cannot be outrun. “Staring Into Heaven/Shining” is a confessional song, written at a time when I was desperate to gain control over my life through ideas I had about grieving the ‘right’ way. As I tried and failed to reconcile feelings of regret and unanswerable questions, it became clearer to me that all I can do is choose to simply observe the experience of grief. The lyrics are searching, but come to their natural end in a place without resolution; it wasn’t until after finishing the song that I realized there can be hope in accepting that there are things we cannot know about death.

The beautiful song comes with an equally moving music video directed by Henry Kinder and shot across Golden Gate Park and Ocean Beach in San Francisco and Thee Stork Club in Oakland. The existential indie-rock epic is laconic, but every word carries weight: “If all my anger/ And my pain/ Could catch like a flame/ And purify/ And cremate/ Maybe I could be alive/ Know that you’re safe,” Thomson sings. Hear it below.

Revival Of A Friend is out 6/28 via Exploding In Sound.