Distraction, depression, and heartbreak reign supreme in 2025. "Making art in this day and age for me is a battle for focus; we're in an age of interruption," says Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards (stylized as tUnE-yArDs) on sixth album Better Dreaming. Proudly waving an anti-fascist, liberation, freak flag, Better Dreaming contains some of Tune-Yards' smoothest, funkiest, and most direct pop music to date, and yes, you can dance to it.
Its songs came to Garbus and bandmate/partner Nate Brenner with unusual ease, letting the songs come out, following any trail they wished. After COVID-isolation, and time away from touring and live shows, the desire to be moved by music was undeniable. The insane experience of growing an actual human being influenced this as well. Garbus and Brenner's 3-year-old can be heard singing on "Limelight"; the song was born from dancing together as a family to George Clinton. The kid liked the demo so much that whenever Garbus and Brenner tried to push the track forward with a new version or edit, he would demand the first version. Thus the infectious, effortless original groove stayed true.
Recorded as a duo, all but one of these songs are built around Merrill's drum looping and rhythm building, as they were on some of their early albums like Bird-Brains and W H O K I L L. Opening track "Heartbreak" builds huge chords of Garbus' vocal harmony around a fat beat full of clicks, pops, samples, and dubbed snares. Garbus sings of heartbreak as fuel, as a challenge; lyrics like "Watch me survive another heartbreak" hit like a call to action. Four-on-the-floor "How Big Is the Rainbow" drips with disco-house, queer-club, anthemic strobe energy.
Better Dreaming is ferocious in its invocation of self-love, collective action, dance floor liberation, ego-death deliverance, and a future we could all thrive in. When diving into the present darkness of the world, Tune-Yards asks themselves how much literal energy and joy can be conjured and pumped through the music. In its life-affirming art-pop of the apocalypse, Better Dreaming comes true.
