The Sun And Her Scorch

Since releasing their aptly titled debut, 2018’s Baby Teeth, Dizzy has had to do a lot of growing up—and fast. That record catapulted the indie-pop quartet from the eastern Toronto suburb of Oshawa onto Canadian tours with Death Cab for Cutie, festival bills across the Atlantic, and the podium at the 2019 Juno Awards, where they claimed the prize for Alternative Album of the Year. But when they hunkered down in a cottage near Sudbury, Ontario, to begin writing album number two, they knew they couldn’t simply repeat their debut’s winning formula of wistful teenage reminiscences wrapped in synth-speckled serenades. “Baby Teeth was written largely about being in my teens and about to graduate high school,” singer Katie Munshaw tells Apple Music. “Whereas on this record, I'm in my twenties now and I'm not thinking about the guy in high school who broke my heart anymore. And when you're not thinking about romantic heartbreak, there are so many other things to be upset about: mental health and being afraid of aging and death and saying goodbye to friends—this whole other world I didn't even know I could write about.” The Sun and Her Scorch tackles these heavy subjects with a newfound boldness and amplified radiance. Taking sonic cues from Phoebe Bridgers and The National’s I Am Easy to Find—“artists that use electronics and acoustic instruments in a way that melt together nicely,” says Munshaw—the record effortlessly stakes the middle ground between the shimmering textures of ’90s dream pop and the finely chiseled hooks of modern Top 40 hits, lending Munshaw’s most despairing confessionals a euphoric magical-realist glow. Here, Munshaw offers us a track-by-track glimpse into her psyche.

Worms
“'Worms' felt sort of like a theme for the record: This song is like a hand coming out from the earth, reaching out to the listener and grabbing them, and bringing them down to this world of The Sun and Her Scorch. I think 'Worms' signifies this feeling of being underground and feeling trapped and suffocated.”

Sunflower
“'Sunflower' is sort of like a cousin to 'Worms.' It was the first time I had really addressed that underground feeling, and this song really just stares back at that feeling, which I really like. I think, in a lot of moments, it feels really vulnerable and sad, but it's also strong and it's me recognizing that maybe I need to make some changes in my life.”

Good and Right
“I came up with that opening line [‘How do you think you'll die/I ask you point-blank on a Tuesday night’] while I was walking to my job one day, and it was in my voice notes for a long time, and Charlie [Spencer, drummer] had a demo and I put it over top. There's just something really magical that happens sometimes in a band where somebody has an idea and then another idea from someone else just fits perfectly over top of it. One of those things that I learned that I can write about—and one that I am freaking out about constantly—is death, and realizing that I'm getting older, and that's exactly what this song is about. It's also about being afraid of the unknown. I wasn't raised religiously, so this is sort of me wondering what happens after all this.”

The Magician
“This song began as a demo that Charlie had and I liked it immediately, and wrote a lot of lyrics to it the same day he showed it to me. I was just like, ‘You're banished from the studio room, and you're not allowed back here until I say so!’ It was just a lot of fun to write—I don't think we've written such a poppy track like that before. I think we were really focused on making a good bridge, and that's where that 'meet me at midnight' part came through. Bridges will be the bane of my existence, along with second verses. They're tough to crack, but once you get a good bridge, it just takes the song somewhere else and it allows the song to come out of the plateau that you're in. But the song is actually about a friend of mine who passed away—it's about grief and wanting to bring her magically back to life and hopelessly wondering if she'll come to my show. It's grief in a really innocent sense.”

Beatrice
“‘Beatrice’ is a street in Oshawa, but the song is largely fiction. We wrote it really early on when I was still trying to write romantic heartbreak songs, and everything was coming out really ingenuine. To crack it, I had to tap into relationships around me. My best friend was going through a breakup, my parents were separating, and I just kind of drew from their experiences at the time. So this song is a mash-up of their relationships falling apart.”

Roman Candles
“A lot of my friends went to university and they have nine-to-five jobs now and they're starting to buy homes and have babies, and it's really bizarre to feel like I'm not even close to that. The song is about being nervous and scared that I've made the wrong decision in pursuing music as a career. I feel like I'm being left behind in a way. I think it's hard for people to understand music as a career when you're not famous. If you're not Dua Lipa, people are worried about you. They don't realize that it is a career option. It can be hard to relate to people, especially when I'm not going to work every morning. Christmas dinners are usually pretty awkward. 'Oh, you're still doing music, eh?' 'Yes, grandpa!'”

Lefty
“This song is about being way too codependent on a partner. That beginning part [with the TV channels changing] is something we found on the internet—it's actually one guy speaking the whole time, and he's just changing characters [for each channel]. I thought that was a good metaphor for me and all my different personalities in a relationship. There's this social norm of 'if I don't have my Prince Charming, I'll die,' and how that's supposed to be romantic but in reality that's actually insane and not realistic.”

Primrose Hill
“We were on tour in London and had a night off, so we went out with a friend of ours from a band in London and we drank a lot and I had a few too many and said a lot of things that night that I felt really guilty about the next morning. So this song is really about guilt and remorse and treating the people you love so awfully, and them just loving you anyway. That's what the bridge with pitched-down vocals is about: ‘Anywhere you go, I'll be there to dote’ is sort of like that person who loves you and is saying, ‘It's okay,’ and they're accepting your apology.”

Daylight Savings Time
“This song is about depression and thinking that it's seasonal, and then when the year turns around and it's summertime again, you realize that maybe it wasn't seasonal and maybe there's something more to it than that.”

Ten
“'Ten' is about being in love with somebody and realizing that people die—you can grow old and have a really wonderful long life with someone, but you die alone. In the song, the lyric 'the sun and her scorch' is meant to just reference the sun and its actual heat. But in relation to the record, it was a pretty good metaphor for myself and all the ways that I'm harmful or mean to people around me. And I think every song on this record is just battling these patterns in myself that I don't really like.”

Worms II
“‘Worms’ started as one full-length track, and we decided to cut it in half. Having it end of the record was kind of like an end-credits move.”