By Andrew Stahl

Half Waif released a new single, “Horse Racing,” the fifth from their upcoming album Mythopoetics. Written at the beginning of the pandemic in March, lead singer Nandi Rose said “It felt like we were racehorses who had only just realized we were on a track, going around again and again. There’s no end in a circle. And maybe now that we recognized this, we could break out of it, bust right out of the ring.”

Mythopoetics follows 2020’s The Caretaker, an album that found Rose singing of her loneliness in the solitude of her Hudson Valley home. On “Horse Racing” her isolation is no longer self-imposed, but isolation isn’t loneliness. As the pandemic loosens its grip and comes to seem, to the lucky ones, nothing more than a dream groggily awoken from with the return to normalcy, “Horse Racing” asks us: will you get back on your track, or is there an escape from the circle?

Mythopoetics is out July 9.