Last year, Ducks Ltd., the Toronto jangle-pop duo formerly known as Ducks Unlimited, released their debut album Modern Fiction. It’s an impressive LP, but there’s at least one strong Ducks Ltd. track that didn’t make the cut. The band wrote the twitchy, driving “Sheets Of Grey” years ago, and it’s a live favorite for them, but they didn’t think it made sense on Modern Fiction. Instead, Ducks Ltd. have released the song as a standalone single today.

“Sheets Of Grey” is a song about depression and about worrying that you’ll never be happy again. That sounds dour, but the song itself is something else. Ducks Ltd. play “Sheets Of Grey” with serious purpose, and the song has a playful melodic zippiness working for it. That makes “Sheets Of Grey” a stylistic descendent of the Chills or the Feelies — bands who treated their sadness with rigor. In a press release, Tom McGreevy says:

This song is actually one of the oldest in our catalog. We wrote it around the same time as “Get Bleak,” or maybe a little bit after, and played it live a bunch, but never quite finished it. We kept poking at it for a long time until we finally got it to where we wanted it to be, which happened during the Modern Fiction sessions. We ended up leaving it off the record as it didn’t quite thematically fit with the other songs, but I’m excited we’re finally getting to put it out as I’ve always liked it. It’s about the inertia of depression, and how hard it can be to break out of those cycles, but also about the pleasure of embracing that state. There is a certain, temporary comfort to be found in the abyss! Somewhere right before it inevitably becomes extremely awful.

Listen to “Sheets Of Grey” below.

“Sheets Of Grey” is out now on Carpark.