Starcleaner Reunion make peace with old memories in “Lay on Plastic Moment”

Singer Jo Roman aims to compartmentalise old memories after returning to a place that now feels unrecognizable. “For me, this song is derived from my personal experience of moving back to New York in 2023,” she explains. “It's a very ethereal song exploring the stresses of coming back to something you thought was a familiar home, but now is just something completely different.” Wobbly synths and heavy distortion mimic the distance and discomfort between how she thought her environment would feel and how it actually is. Ahead of this album cycle – Umbrella is out September 25 via Take Care Records – the band wanted to record each song without thinking about how they’d play it live. “Lay on Plastic Moment”, however, followed the opposite trajectory. According to drummer Pat Drummond: “This song’s a funny one because a lot of the songs on the record are things that we were playing live and tailored in the studio. Whereas this one came out of an old demo, and every few months we would be in the practice room and try it again. It was never really clicking for us until we brought it into the studio. Then we made it work while recording it. Now we're trying to figure out how to play it li...