Margaret McCarthy, Emerson Hunton, and Ben Cruz met at Oberlin College and, upon relocating to Chicago, started an indie rock band called Moontype. They’re signed to Born Yesterday, the company run by Deeper’s Kevin Fairbairn and recording engineer Greg Obis, and today they’ve delivered their debut single for the label. “Ferry” is a churning, dreamy track. Heavy yet gentle and beautiful, it unloads a dense emotional outpouring at the intersection of indie-pop, heartland rock, and shoegaze.

“I miss you before you’re gone/ Friendship only lasts so long,” McCarthy sings. “When we grow we grow apart/ I’m left floating in the dark/ Waiting for my roots to find the ground/ Looking for the sun I’m blinded now.” In an increasingly intense statement to The Fader, she unpacks the song:

“Ferry” is a song about the loss of friendship, not when it breaks apart quickly and devastatingly but when it slowly unravels and you watch it go. 3 or 4 of my friendships made their way into this song. I think about a friend who was about to go on a two-year long tour, and I started to drift away from him months before he actually left — a trick the mind plays to make the break less painful. Your friend leaves and afterwards you’re left with these visceral memories — running around the city at night, drinking whiskey in the alley — and in memory form those experiences gain potency, like “ah that was really living, and what I have now is nothing.” And that vivid memory stands in high contrast to the way their entire personhood is slowly fading from your mind, you forget how they walk, what kind of jokes they made. And then you’re left with only yourself and you realize that you’ve defined yourself through the relationships you’ve been in, and when those people go away you feel like an empty shell (no snail inside!) and that feeling is enough to make a person say “I wanna take the ferry to Michigan! Get me out of this place!”

Watch the video below, where you can also find prior Moontype singles “The Great Ohio” and “Not That Easy.”

“Ferry” is out now on Born Yesterday.