Haunted Summer - Whole (2022)

Haunted Summer have found their happy place on their third album, “Whole.” It’s where hope trumps melancholy, where specificity matters more than opaque moods, where something transformative might be just a gentle chord change or a turn of a phrase away.

A soft-to-the-touch mix of psych-folk and dream-pop, “Whole” finds the married duo of Bridgette Moody and John Seasons less reliant on sheer texture than on their previous releases, 2017’s “Spirit Guides” and 2014’s “Birth.” It’s ethereal in the way hearing an AM radio playing in the distance is haunting. And it’s incrementally less focused on the duo’s relationship with each other than with the people around them.

“A lot of our earliest songs were absolutely love letters to each other,” Moody says. “… ‘Whole’ is more of a love letter to those outside of us, those who inspire us, who infuriate us. Just having that honest conversation.”

The title track is the album’s Mazzy Star moment (because what would an album like this be without one?). It’s six minutes of conflicted emotions about the passing of a friend. “It’s a song about loss,” Moody says, “inspired by a close friend who struggled with mental illness and addiction and lost his life too soon. The song begs the questions: Can death bring peace to those who have lived a less than easy life? Can those who endlessly get the short end of the stick ever find relief?

“I think it’s fitting as the title track because the new album is really just a series of letters, of love and of frustration, to people in our lives. And that song is the ultimate hope for reconciliation.”