TUNES // Runnner – Heliotrope

Post by Misha

This song bursts into existence like the first sliver of sun over the freeway, making me think about how I wish I was awake for more sunrises. There’s something so gentle and clean about them, and it’s rare to get to see something be really new like that.

Runnner songs are often tinged with a mournful optimism. They live in a state in between regret for yesterday and a cautious openness to tomorrow. It’s generational music, certainly, in that the specific, mundane existential dread that accompanies being young in a cartoonishly dystopian age is present in almost every moment. (In ‘Heliotrope’, I love the description of the uneasy feeling that comes from being sad on a beautiful day, that sense that we have no business feeling bad on an objectively good day, because who knows how many more of them we’ll get?)

What sets Runnner apart, though, is not their ennui, or even the softness with which they present it, but the way that they reimagine that ennui tumbled through a delicate orange California sunshine. By the time it comes out the other side its edge has gone. All the various terrors of the past and future are unwoven and left to wind themselves up again, maybe this time into a different shape.

Heliotrope is Runnner’s first single since their 2019 EP, Fan On, which we loved very much. They have a show coming up at The Echo on February 20th – get tickets here. Buy their music here.