Boyish – ‘Gun’ album review: Raw, dreamy timelessness
As music lovers, we think a lot about the true meaning of “timeless”. Is it rehashing old, familiar tropes in new ways, escaping becoming dated through ambiguous themes? Is it something you can’t even predict in the moment until one day, there it is? Boyish’s Gun might have been a project born out of the pandemic, but the impact of their debut feels anything but culturally stagnant.
Here, in a fictional place called Gun, Boyish – made of India Shore and Claire Altendahl – channels the lush indie realness of Wolf Alice with something less descriptive, shoegaze, perhaps, undercut by the rawness of underground favourites like The Velvet Underground. But even those comparisons feel out of place when Gun, the record and the make-believe location, floats elsewhere, anchoring everything from the perils of giving your heart away (“I love you but it’s breaking my heart” in ‘Doing it Behind the Marching Band’) and the frustration of longing (“I want to be patient like you” in ‘Big’).
Images across the record call attention to their inspiration while writing it, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Thelma & Louise and Twin Peaks. Most of these capture that inexplicable “timeless” feel – the one that feels significant because it ventures somewhere deep, each holding its own beginning, middle, and end. Like ‘There She Goes’, which builds at first before exploding into something more demanding.
What’s particularly impressive about the atmospheres they create isn’t the ambiguity but that they often combine several feelings in one. It’s a hard craft to make music that suits almost every mood, from the angsty to the joyful, but the dreamy quality often makes for a pleasant mix that’s both cathartic and relaxing. Like ‘You and I’, ‘Funeral Synths’, and ‘Baby’, which bring to life Shore and Altendahl’s vision through Loren Humphrey’s eye for energy and authenticity.
For a debut, the material is incredibly accomplished. And that’s not to diminish just how good these musicians are, because they’ve already proven just how much they are. But here, there’s both a raw charge shaped to that familiar shoegaze polished refinement. But the arrangements aren’t the only appealing part of Gun, as on songs like ‘A Town Called Gun’, Shore’s vocals take centre stage, with a smooth, eloquent tone that could just as easily have come out of the 1960s singer-songwriter boom.
And the words come poetically, soft yet emotionally vulnerable, and charged with pain, joy, and everything in between. A swirling mix of rock, indie, country, and other things you can’t put your finger on – a bit of everything, like if there was a real place called Gun, it’d be filled with something for everybody. And maybe that’s the true meaning of timeless.
Defining track: ‘Doing it Behind the Marching Band’ – put this on a good speaker and try not to get goosebumps within the first ten seconds.
For fans of: Listening to music to feel closer to yourself.
A concluding comment about being timeless: “Nobody knows what the formula is, but when you hear it, you just know.”
Release date: September 5th, 2025 | Producer: Loren Humphrey | Label: R&R
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