At the outset of Tune-Yards’ vibrant new album Better Dreaming, Merrill Garbus asks in a hushed voice, “Ready?” It’s the sound of a performer steeling herself, a private inhale before unleashing “Heartbreak,” a full-bodied groove full of joy and pain in equal measure. “Watch me survive another heartbreak,” Garbus intones sweetly, before belting her way through a rousing chorus and a middle eight of sheer vocal force. It’s an apt introduction to a record that charts the tense relationship between vulnerability and strength.
Better Dreaming is the sixth studio album from Garbus, who first debuted as a solo artist with the lo-fi tape BiRd-BrAiNs and now collaborates as a duo with her partner, multi-instrumentalist and producer Nate Brenner. Armed with a ukulele, head-spinning percussion, and a liberally used loop pedal, Garbus built a reputation for visceral, biting alternative pop music built on the rhythms of Afro-pop and funk. Tune-Yards’ most recent records, 2018’s I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life and 2021’s sketchy., both reckoned directly with Garbus’s position as a white woman working in African musical traditions, and with whiteness more generally. Though ambitious, the songs lacked some of the hurricane dynamism of the earlier music, feeling instead restrained and careful, and sometimes weighed down by fear and guilt. On the breezier Better Dreaming, Garbus continues to examine our political landscape—and her own position in it—with her usual unflinching lyrical style, but this time it’s been metabolized into something more outward-facing and hopeful: songs you can really dance to.
Garbus has previously spoken about the importance of singing, vocalizing, and humming as “a pathway through the hardest parts of our psyches.” Better Dreaming feels like her fullest expression of that idea; her voice sounds more full-bodied than ever as she urges you to “sing yourself into existence” at the cacophonous finale of album closer “Sanctuary.” Tune-Yards’ instrumentation has famously been dense with ideas, loops, and samples, but here it’s more often pulled taut, to allow Garbus’s voice to rush like water to fill every crack. On the title track, her languishing cries are layered together in a digital ocean that washes over the listener. Later, on “See You There,” what begins as a plaintive folk song erupts into a scream that crackles with distortion and rage.
It’s Tune-Yards’ most accessible and melodic album to date. “Limelight,” the funk-driven lead single, was inspired by Garbus and Brenner dancing to George Clinton with their toddler—who also features on backing vocals—and it’s no surprise to learn that it was conceived with family-friendly dance parties in mind. The music may lack some of the experimental bite that characterized early Tune-Yards releases like w h o k i l l, but it’s still colored by Garbus’s political intent: “Let go of the life you’re living,” the sun-bright chorus urges: “Let yourself see how free you can be.”
Just as recordings of Garbus’s giggling toddler go toe-to-toe with liberatory sentiment on “Limelight,” the whole record skirts the line between the intimate and the communal. Singing about her experience of parenthood and her hopes and fears for her child—and children generally—she also makes space for anthemic songs that build a sense of joyful coalition, such as the handclap-fueled “How Big Is the Rainbow.” These songs invite the listener in, whether in big dance-party moments or in the gentler Motown sway of “Get Through,” where Garbus delivers a lullaby for difficult times: “We don’t know how we get through, but we do.” Where in the past she’s sometimes been accused of being overly didactic, here Garbus is more emotionally vulnerable. There are no straightforward answers to how we get through, but in that “we” lies a powerful article of faith: that true strength lies in togetherness.
