LOS ANGELES, CA- There is something almost cruel about the way childhood teaches us to believe we can outrun things we do not yet have the words to understand. On “milkweed butterfly,” Brooklyn-based smush capture that feeling in miniature: a child, a butterfly, bare feet moving fast enough to imagine flight, and then the ground.
“milkweed butterfly” is the first single from smush’s newly announced album, i’ll always wish,,, due January 22, 2027. The record follows the band’s standards EP and finds founding members Emily Borrowman and Atley King, now joined by Rudi Neubrander on drums and Wilson Woods on keys, pushing their shoegaze foundation into considerably less predictable territory. Produced with Jackson Baker of witches exist, the single folds drum-and-bass and jungle-inspired breakbeats, electronic glitches, noise rock and shoegaze guitars into something simultaneously frantic and strangely intimate.
That intimacy comes largely from Borrowman. The song is written from the perspective of a child experiencing anxiety and depression without yet possessing the tools to understand either. Borrowman has connected those feelings to the instability she experienced immigrating to the United States, and the lyrics reflect that perspective with remarkably little embellishment. Failure, loneliness and feeling impossibly small are expressed through the simple observations of someone confronting emotions bigger than herself.
And then there is the butterfly.
I’ll admit that “milkweed butterfly” sent me down a small rabbit hole. I knew what a butterfly was… obviously… but “milkweed” was little more than a name to me. My first reaction was almost comically literal: it sounded like some failed plant, something that had never managed to graduate beyond being called a weed. The truth makes the imagery considerably more interesting. Milkweed is a flowering plant with an extraordinary relationship to monarch butterflies. Monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed, and their caterpillars depend upon it for food before undergoing the transformation that eventually gives them wings.
To be clear, “milkweed butterfly” is not the formal name for a monarch, nor does Borrowman explicitly identify the butterfly in the lyric as one. Still, knowing the relationship between milkweed and monarchs makes the association difficult to ignore. Suddenly, the child is holding something connected to transformation and flight while feeling too small for the world around her. Something with grandeur. Something monarchical. She runs barefoot, fast enough to imagine herself taking off too, only to hit the ground.
What struck me just as much is how little smush needs to say to make all of this felt. The lyrics are remarkably sparse, yet they somehow fill the song. Borrowman’s voice remains tender and almost delicate against an arrangement that feels positively visceral. Breakbeats twitch and race beneath her while distorted guitars and shoegaze noise press in from seemingly every direction. Her vocal never tries to compete with that chaos, and its vulnerability becomes more pronounced because of it.
There is something almost child-sized about her voice existing inside an arrangement so much larger and more overwhelming than she is. When Borrowman describes being too small for the house around her, the production seems to build that house in real time. Everything feels huge and restless, with her voice caught in the middle.
That contrast also makes the drum-and-bass influence feel like more than an aesthetic experiment. The frantic rhythm becomes motion itself: bare feet running, a mind racing, a child trying to escape something she cannot yet name. The shoegaze guitars provide no easy refuge either. They press hard, turning what could have simply been an interesting collision of genres into part of the storytelling.
According to the band, “milkweed butterfly” underwent a transformation of its own. It began as a stripped-down demo with MIDI drums before evolving through multiple lineups and eventually being meticulously reconstructed in the studio with Baker. That process feels fitting for a song so preoccupied with transformation.
It also makes “milkweed butterfly” an intriguing introduction to ill always wish,,. Across the nine-song album, Borrowman says she reflects on girlhood, grief and lost innocence following her and King’s move from Vancouver to Brooklyn. Those themes give this first single a broader resonance: the adult songwriter now possesses language for feelings the child at the center of the song could never fully articulate.
Maybe that is what stays with me most. A child does not need to understand anxiety as anxiety for the feeling to be real. Sometimes all she knows is that the house feels too big, she does not want to be alone, and if she runs fast enough, maybe she can fly.
For a moment, smush let you believe she might.
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