It seems that Smaller Hearts have been working on a theme—or possibly revisiting one—for their upcoming album. Attention. “Mean Routine,” the latest single from wife and husband duo of Kristina Parlee (The Maynards/The Reference Desk) and Ron Bates (Orange Glass/The Memories Attack), is about falling into a pattern that has somehow veered away from living your best life. Is it a coincidence that we’re experiencing deja vu?
In 2019 Smaller Hearts released their album Honestly featuring the single “Circuitry,” a single about repeating the patterns of our lives. Admittedly, the band suggest that those circuits offered some comfortable familiarity, but that 2019. That was before the monotony became all-encompassing, punctuated by the occasional nose swab.
Smaller Hearts’ “Double Space,” released earlier this year, also addressed the monotony of said circumstances and how it is the duty of all good citizens to do better; to challenge our shrinking worlds in ways that are simultaneously safe but expansive… presumably in the most enlightened sense.
“Mean Routine” is the extension of both — a world in which we’ve been disillusioned with cyclical conformity — but not without a little encouragement.
“This song is about how we can have great ideals and big plans for who we think we are, who we want to be, and how we’ll change the world—but the daily grind of going to work and paying the bills gets in the way,” said the duo. “The mean routine is the pattern of not getting to do the things we really want to do.
“‘Mean Routine’ comes back to 2020 being a big interrupted year. And being interrupted by something big that you couldn’t control, you start to think about the smaller ways life pushes you away from the things you want to pursue, and how we should push back and just try to do them. After a year that kept us from our friends and our interests and our plans, ‘Mean Routine’ encourages us to try to seize the moment as we emerge into the possibility of something new.”
Attention, the band’s third full-length album and synth-pop expedition is being released July 23, 2023.