Belfast quartet Junk Drawer caught our attention last month with “Tears In Costa,” the first single from their upcoming EP The Dust Has Come To Stay. And today, they’re sharing a second preview of the collection, “Railroad King,” a rambling rocker traveling down winding roads of guitar. As the band’s Jake Lennox explains:

I’d written the lyrics to this song before I’d realised I was on the autistic spectrum, but the lyrics made total sense once the realisation hit. It’s about not wanting to be away from the public world, adventuring happily with my imagination; walking by myself and making up songs etc. It also references the autistic feeling of feeling like my body is just a vessel that I want to “zip off” to be my true self.

Lyrically, as I noodled through the main melody, the primary influence was Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Free”. During the writing sessions for the song as I was improvising, one of the repeated verses became “I just walk along and stroll and sing. I see better days and I do better things.” Folk music has always been my favourite genre and I always subconsciously bring in those kinds of songwriting elements rather than more modern rock formats. For example, this song has no chorus as such, but it has a refrain at the end of each verse that performs that function. I much prefer that style, it means I can play with the rhyming a bit more and I can add more words.

Listen to “Railroad King” below.

The Dust Has Come To Stay is out 3/11 via Art For Blind. Pre-order it here.