LOS ANGELES, CA- It was one of those quiet Sunday afternoons when the mind wants to drift and the body wants to stay still. I wasn’t planning on falling into new music, but then I pressed play on a song called “Nuclear Fallout” by a band I’d never heard of: sundayclub. Suddenly my stillness had a soundtrack. What unfolded was a track wrapped in reverb and restraint, a dream-pop haze that felt both intimate and infinite.
Courtney Carmichael’s voice arrives like a whisper… hushed but weighted, her tone carrying that curious mix of fragility and introspection that seems to define the best dream-pop vocalists. Yet beneath the glimmer lies something darker. “Breaking apart again,” she sings to open the song, a line that sets the mood for a love story on the verge of something darker. The production, awash in glistening synths and shimmering guitars, disguises the heartbreak, like smiling through tears under a fading sunset.
Musically, “Nuclear Fallout” feels less like a song and more like a memory dissolving in slow motion. The drum kit pushes forward with an undercurrent of momentum that reminds me faintly of The Sundays. There a sense of breezy melancholy wrapped around an ache you can’t quite name. But where The Sundays floated with jangle, sundayclub sways with fog; it’s as though the duo poured melancholy through a soft-focus lens and let it blur into something beautiful.
The song’s lyrics capture emotional exhaustion in simple but heavy turns: “It’s far too late to go back now / Put on the brakes, we’re fading out.” There’s a clarity to the writing that makes the song feel conversational, but its imagery… of implosions, explosions, and fallouts… pulls it into something more cinematic. It’s heartbreak disguised as a pastel daydream, a quiet plea sung from the wreckage of self-awareness.
Formed in the stillness of rural Manitoba, sundayclub (Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre) have released their debut EP Bannatyne, out now via Paper Bag Records. This single feels like a postcard from a collection of songs that I anticipate is steeped in nostalgia and emotional reconstruction. This single doesn’t hide behind the haze, it uses it to reveal what’s beneath.
This song has definitely piqued my curiosity. There’s a sense that sundayclub are quietly building something special, as apparently many other publications are high on their music offering. I’ll be pressing play on their other tracks on late-night drives or even at the gym, just to see if the rest of their repertoire matches up to the dreamlike pull of “Nuclear Fallout.”
Bannatyne and “Nuclear Fallout” are available now via Paper Bag Records.
Follow sundayclub on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.
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