BIO || VAN DARIEN
Van Darien should've felt elated. She'd just released Levee, a debut album filled with southern soundscapes and moody, melodic songs written alongside partners like Maren Morris. Championed by Rolling Stone for "[mixing] Americana atmospherics with overdriven guitar and throaty hooks fit for pop royalty," Levee was her big break, spreading her music far beyond her adopted home of East Nashville.
Even so, her world was in upheaval. Back in Weatherford, Texas, where Van had grown up listening to albums by Fleetwood Mac, the Highwaymen, and alt-country pioneer Billy Falcon, her parents had fallen on hard times. At home in Tennessee, her romantic relationship of nine years was crumbling. And everywhere she looked, the world around her seemed to struggle beneath the weight of a pandemic that had left permanent scars in its wake.
"Everything seemed to be spinning out of control," she remembers. "With all that uncertainty around me, I wanted something that would make me feel better. The only way I could control what was going on was by creating my own world… and that world was bummertown."
Split halfway between autobiography and surrealistic fiction, bummertown unfolds like the soundtrack to some long-lost movie. It's a cinematic, cathartic album about leaving behind the things that bring us down — dead-end towns, uncontrollable lovers, haunted memories, lingering anxieties — and putting the pedal to the metal, speeding toward a bigger, brighter horizon instead. With its sweeping synthesizers, spacey guitars, and larger-than-life choruses, it's also a reframing of Van Darien's sound, nodding to her roots in Texas and Tennessee even as it builds its own unique musical geography. Call it astral American rock & roll, maybe. Call it alternative Americana. Call it synth-driven singer/songwriter. Van Darien just calls it her own.
"I'm a big fan of high contrast," she says. "I've always loved when a rocker sings a ballad. Something about hearing Tom Waits' rough voice reciting a love poem over a dreamy clarinet creates some type of balance in the world. It soothes me. I think it's a lovely complement."
A complement, indeed. bummertown mixes the organic with the otherworldly, backlighting the sharp edge of of Van Darien's songwriting with the rounded glow of drum machines, vintage keyboards, billowing reverb, and experimental guitar tones. To create that uplifting sound, she teamed up with collaborators like songwriter Daniel Markham — another Texas native with an appreciation for '90s alternative music — and producer Owen Beverly. "Daniel came to Nashville for four nights," she says of the album's co-writing sessions. "In those four days, we wrote nine songs and made demos for all of them." bummertown's opening title track, a sweeping, Springsteen-sized anthem about escaping the clutches of something you've outgrown. Punctuated by booming snare hits that echo out into the ether, "bummertown" serves as a harbinger of what's to come, kicking off an album whose track list also includes standouts like "end of the world" (a raw, riff-driven rocker, driven forward by fuzz guitar), "surf the stars" (an astral, atmospheric song partially inspired by Peter Pan), and the glittering "pyromania" (a bittersweet send-off to a relationship that burned far too brightly to last).
The result, she says, is "a 33-minute journey through your imagination," stocked with songs that find beauty in struggle, color in austerity, and uplift in the challenges that pull us back to earth. "It's a fantasy rooted in reality," Van adds. "In some ways, the songs are just sensationalized versions of the real thing. I put the high saturation on lighter songs like 'dream' and 'starship exodus,' and I put the high contrast on songs like 'longshadow,' 'haunted house,' and 'end of the world.'"
These days, Van Darien has earned the right to feel elated. Reintroducing herself as a songwriter unbound by genre or geography, she creates her own universe with bummertown, an album that swoons, stirs, and swaggers in equal measure.
