I first heard Half Happy last week in So Young Magazine, and they couldn’t have been designed in a lab to be more suited to my taste and this blog. The song evolves from a mild-ish indie pop song into something fairly intense. It builds momentum as it goes, and the lyrics sound like a diary entry. The song is right on brand for me, and the video is charmingly DIY:

Half Happy is a band from Cardiff that has been putting out melodic indie rock since 2022. Many of their songs have some minor off-kilter characteristic – an unexpected minor-key melody, spoken lyrics in an otherwise traditional song, or lyrics that are extremely concrete, or sound somewhat improvised, or that subvert expectations in some way. The other single in the latest release is called “Slow Down”. Hit play and you’ll hear what I mean:

The songs are written by vocalist Rosalie Miller and drummer Zac Noneley. In this interview in buzz magaine, Nonely says that the band has recorded 7 tracks for the September EP Conversation Killer, and that we might get one more single before the record’s release.

The two new singles above are a good progression from their earlier releases. The earlier stuff sounds like a band finding their feet — the lyrics on debut single “Lovesweep” veer close to stream-of-consciousness writing and seem to accelerate as the song progresses, while “Say This Twice” has Drahla-style spoken word verses. They play together nicely, but they seem to be gradually narrowing in on the melodic dream-pop/indie-rock style that defines their current sound.

They have an excellent live sound as well. Here’s a video of an older song (“Runaway Girl”) from a show in June:

They’ve got a thing with sunflowers too, you see them in that video as well as this C-bloc sessions video. They reference them in their Instagram bio. I love the sunflowers, and I want to know more.

Here’s another great live performance on Bloc Sessions. The second song in the set isn’t available on streaming, but the vocal is clearly a song written by Rosalie. Sunflowers abound:

The debut EP Conversation Killer comes out September 20.

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