Milly Share New Single & Video “Ring True” Jul 27, 2022

Past Praise for MILLY:

“a band that fuses the wall-of-guitar sounds of Hum and Catherine with early emo like Sunny Day Real Estate and minimalist beauty à la Belly, resulting in a warm bath of fuzzed-out indie rock that nonetheless balances the riffing with gentler moments of airy shoegaze” – AV Club

“Meeting at the midpoint between shoegaze and ’90s-style alt-rock, “Talking Secret” lets torrents of guitars overwhelm bandleader Brendan Dyer’s hazily moody vocals” – NPR

““Crawling tempos and dazed, cinematic lo-fi… a band to watch” – Paste Magazine

“impeccable alternative influences, a towering instrumental presence, and an expressive main songwriter already point to a bright future for the band.” – Under the Radar

“a soundscape both comforting and abrasive” – Beats Per Minute

“A fuzz-laden jammer that re-envisages J Mascis at the head of a dream pop outfit” – Clash

Today, Los Angeles band MILLY have shared the second single from their highly anticipated debut album Eternal Ring, set for release September 30th via cult indie label Dangerbird Records (Grandaddy, Swervedriver). “Ring True” is one of the most ornate songs MILLY have ever written, double-time drums interlocking with the guitar to create a rich, finely-drawn tableau. “‘Ring True’ came to life initially as a short poem I had written,” explains Brendan Dyer, “I wanted to feel alive and feel free and the words just flowed out of my system. When I began putting down music to the words, I was thinking about the freedom I’ve always felt while listening to bands like Death Cab for Cutie and The Smiths. There was also an intentional nod to some of my alt country heroes ala Kurt Vile, Lucinda Williams in some of the twang I was chasing with my guitar.”

Produced in LA with Gleemer’s Corey Coffman, the forthcoming Eternal Ring is kinetic, physical, and often a little bit volatile — a mixture of emo music and 90s-indebted indie that tastes as if it’s been fermenting for years, feeding on itself until it becomes something new entirely.

A profound first full-length statement from principal songwriter Brendan Dyer and his closest collaborator, bass player Yarden Erez, it’s a record that takes the anxiety of modern-day America and filters it through a prismatic, powerfully individualistic lens, resulting in something intense, bracing, and deeply modern. This is Milly with the fat trimmed and the frayed edges cut off. “Everything that we’re doing now was there but I feel like we just let it marinate a little longer or something — it feels a lot more focused now” says Dyer.

LISTEN & SHARE: “RING TRUE”

Originally the solo project of Brendan Dyer, his relocation from Connecticut to Los Angeles saw the band expand to include collaborator Yarden Erez. After signing to Dangerbird Records, 2019 saw the band on tour with Swervedriver & DIIV, and in 2021 they released their acclaimed EP Wish Goes On.

To understand Eternal Ring, you have to go back to Dyer’s childhood. Learning guitar and drums from his uncle, a musician, from the age of ten, Dyer was one of the only young people in his rural Connecticut town interested in anything other than sports and other stereotypical markers of American life. Naturally, Dyer began to gravitate towards emo — the closest thing many teens have to outsider art — as an art form he could identify with, bands like Hawthorne Heights subconsciously laying the groundwork for the music he would make as an adult. “It probably only lasted a year or two that I was interested in that sort of thing, but now I feel like it’s become a thing in my life where it’s like, full circle,” he says. “When we were writing this album, and touring before writing this album, I was reconnecting with a lot of the music that I was listening to in my youth and realizing that there was a reason why I liked this music so much.”

The MILLY of Eternal Ring, though, is a vastly different project from the one Dyer began in his childhood bedroom. Where the band’s old songs were dazed and gorgeously laconic, Eternal Ring is muscular, punchy, almost alarmingly direct. You only need to hear album opener and debut single “Illuminate” to understand the change: slipping quickly from emo balladry into something heavy and intoxicatingly intense, it’s a clear marker that this is the work of a tighter, more dynamic MILLY. There is no slack to these songs — even the nine-minute “Stuck In The Middle” is an impossibly taut endurance work, jumping from emotive build to gut-wrenching squall in a second.

Read the full bio by Shaad D’Souza here, and listen to previous singles “Nullify” & “Illuminate” below. MILLY will perform in Los Angeles alongside Launder on July 29th at Moroccan Lounge.