Daydream Review Shares 'Leisure' Title Track

(Big Hassle) Chicago-based psych-pop multi-instrumentalist Elijah Montez, the frontman and sole songwriter of Daydream Review shares the candid and groovy psych-soul title track from the kaleidoscopic debut album Leisure, due out April 7.

Daydream Review is currently taking the new music around his home city of Chicago, IL in celebration of the release. After a performance at G-Man Tavern last month, the artist will bring the mesmerizing show to Cole's Bar for the official album release show on April 8 and will conclude on May 26 at Schubas Tavern.

The title, track out today, confronts the adverse effects of a brutal work culture that capitalism has bred and made routine in today's world. Daydream Review explains, "This song is about the absolute compression of your soul and destruction of your time that work culture and capitalism has made commonplace. There's an uncertainty that it creates in terms of how you view your life, and how you'll look back on it, how you can take care of yourself and your loved ones." It continues Daydream Review's theme of poignantly and swiftly examining existential questions with a unique freshness that makes getting lost in the music come naturally. "Sonically," he continues, "it has elements of psychedelic soul, so there's a groove in it, but I think the arrangement communicates the exhaustion that's baked into the lyrics."

Leisure, out next month, is Daydream Review's debut full-length studio album featuring his most realized work to date. Over thirteen chromatic, experimental tracks, the artist's airy production and thoughtful, existential lyricism transports listeners to a fresh sonic universe that pushes the boundaries of modern psychedelic pop. Diving deeper into the album's meaning, Daydream Review explains, "'Leisure' is about the ever-present tension between the desire for free time, for personal enjoyment and leisure, and the demands that capitalistic society places on those desires, and how it restricts the ability to enjoy that free time. Your job and work, to me, seem to be consistent specters that haunt your ability to enjoy your free time, knowing that those demands are always awaiting you when your free time comes to an end."

It is this balancing act that informed much of the album creation and its themes. The artist continues, "Leisure, as a concept, became something almost otherworldly and that much more desirable, something you dream about when you have so much time funneled into work, and the repetitive act of balancing those two ends up being something almost hypnotic, and I tried to channel all of that into the sonic qualities of the album."

Today's release of the title track follows the hypnotic track, "No Eternity" and the dreamy, previously shared track, "Have You Found What You're Looking For?" The latter title acts as both a question to himself as he was in the middle of writing the song wondering which direction to take it in, and as a larger, more existential question about what he wants out of life. One of the last songs written for the album, Montez explains, "I had written roughly the first half of the song and was unsure where to take it, and I remember trying different things, and talking to myself saying, "Have you figured it out? Have you found it?" Montez adds the theme of the track spoke to the broader themes of the project as a whole, "The overarching theme of the song fits quite well in the context of the album-being dissatisfied with work, dissatisfied with the state of the world, and dissatisfied with capitalism at large, and searching for something that can fill in the void that all that dissatisfaction leaves."

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