Bern & The Brights get direct with their dream-pop on "Heart Wide Open" [Premiere]

05 October 2015, 10:45 | Written by The Line of Best Fit

(Tracks)

(Bern & The Brights)

Multi-instrumentalists Bernadette Malavarca and Catherine McGowan used to help each other out on their separate musical projects. In 2008, the pair came together to form Bern & The Brights, and boy we're glad they did.

For "Heart Wide Open" is dream-pop at its most inviting. Covered in starry-eyed synths, celestial harmonies and dense layers, the song has all the ethereal trappings we've come to know and love of the genre.

But its uncompromising lyrical content (the repeated "everyone's a hypocrite and full of shit") marks it out as something a little different; something more rooted to earth. Dream-pop is often associated with the otherworldly abstract lyricism. "Heart Wide Open" practices something closer and clearer, telling the listener to embrace love by opening their hearts. It's beautiful to behold.

Speaking about the track, Bernadette said: "I wrote 'Heart Wide Open' days before my dad passed; he’d been sick for a while. The song reflects what I was being reminded of during that time - to hold onto the things that matter, let go of what doesn’t matter that steals your heart space, that the love in your heart will be the last man standing; the rest falls away."

Bern & The Brights' forthcoming EP Heart Wide Open is slated for release in November.