Goon showed off their soft-reboot transformation last month with the excellent “Garden Of Our Neighbor,” the first single from the Los Angeles indie band’s upcoming Paint By Numbers, Vol. 1 EP. And now, they’re sharing “Fruiting Body,” a comfortingly melancholic song with a kind of warped ’90s lo-fi indie-pop sensibility. As bandleader Kenny Becker explains:

The inspiration for this track came from a long walk I took on a rainy gray day in November 2021. During that time I would often walk along the path that follows a waterway which feeds into the LA river. Passing a patch of mushrooms gave me the idea to title the song “Fruiting Body.” The term refers to the spore-producing structure of fungi.

The line “I found some pink glass buried under the deep end” refers to rose colored glasses, specifically about the past but also being overcome with nostalgia.

It’s kinda loose, but I felt like I was trying to get at the contrast between nostalgia and the present. Not that there’s anything wrong with looking back fondly at the past, it can obviously bring great joy. But sometimes to prevent myself from spiraling into an inescapable pit of sentimentality, I try to ground myself in the present. I think this is reflected in the first verse which looks at “worms in the leaf bed” where presumably the “pink glass” is found. And then by contrast, the second verse is centered more on simple, small things happening in the present moment: my cat on the windowsill watching something, my mint plant next to her.

“Pulling blood through a bad rhyme” and the mention of a deadline is sort of referencing the fact that finished is always better than perfect. Like I think it’s better to have a bad rhyme and meet a deadline than to toil away forever chasing perfection.

Listen below.

Paint by Numbers, Vol. 1 is out 2/25.