Growing Pains look towards forthcoming second album Daniel Loves Mandy Forever with ‘Bottle Rocket’, a heavy yet wistful track inspired by a childhood memory whose edges have become increasingly difficult to distinguish from imagination. “An act of reaching for something that can never be grasped,” explains Carl Taylor. “I don’t know if this was a real memory or a dream.”
Enormous fuzzy power chords immediately give ‘Bottle Rocket’ its weight, moving at a slow, plodding pace with a slight shoegaze haze before quieter verses make space for Kalia Storer’s beautifully dreamlike vocal. Wistful and nostalgic, her relative calm provides a striking contrast to the crash-heavy drums and distorted guitars that repeatedly surge back into view. Rather than steadily building towards a climax, the song moves between these softer and heavier states, with lovely melodic guitar work and subtle chord changes adding to its sense of something half-remembered.
That feeling carries into a visualiser filled with fireworks, funfair snapshots and people partying, evoking fragments of a hazy Fourth of July summer without constructing a fixed narrative around them. As the closing track on Daniel Loves Mandy Forever, ‘Bottle Rocket’ already carries an unmistakable sense of finality — a memory launched into the distance, still visible even as its exact shape becomes harder to make out.
