Brooklyn indie veterans Widowspeak reminded us how beautiful their country-tinged dream-pop can be when they returned last month with “Breadwinner,” their first new song in three years. As you might expect, it turns out that song was our first taste of a new album dropping this year. It’s called Plum; they recorded it with Sam Evian at his studio in the Catskills; it’s out at the end of August; and today we get to hear another song from it.

“Money,” Widowspeak’s new single out today, is driving yet calm, a subtle echo chamber powered by a slapping drumbeat and a recurring high-end guitar riff. Continuing the working person’s plight explored on “Breadwinner,” Molly Hamilton breathily intones, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” She also fits in one of the more durable and flexible phrases in recent years, “What a time to be alive.” She has a way of breathing new resonance into well-worn clichés.

Hamilton shared this statement on the song:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the things we tell ourselves in order to “forget” the toll of our collective actions: whatever makes it easier to forgive what we’re complicit in. Some of that is related to the environment and how people have trained themselves to tune out “environmentalist propaganda.” We made part of the video at a park in Kingston, NY and the archival footage is mostly pulled from films aimed at employees or shareholders of various industries. The narration for many of them (forestry, agriculture, mining, energy) was surprisingly concerned with the dangers of an environment out of balance… Shows you that we haven’t learned much in the last 70 years. On the other hand, the lyrics are also about capitalism and how it trains us to see everything in terms of value, even our experiences, and we get so caught up in seeking some sort of return on investment that we ignore the damage we inflict (on people, on ourselves, on the planet).

Hear the pretty and propulsive “Money” below via the band’s self-directed music video.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Plum”
02 “The Good Ones”
03 “Money”
04 “Breadwinner”
05 “Even True Love”
06 “Amy”
07 “Sure Thing”
08 “Jeannie”
09 “Y2k”

Plum is out 8/28 on Captured Tracks. Pre-order it here.