Sleep

A middle aged man leaves a house alone in the nighttime. Pensive and uneasy, he walks to a port, sits on a rock near the water to watch the sunrise. He is searching for something: is it love? His past youth? Sunlight? Slowly he drifts to sleep listening to the sound of water lapping against the rocks. So starts Sleep, Baseball Gregg’s sophomore album which recounts a journey from the dusk until dawn, ending with the final song Sunrise: “It’s so late that it’s morning, I hope you don’t mind”.

With an unprecedented patient atmosphere, crafted by the duo in the in their usual calm and lazy manner, Sleep touches on themes of remorse, regrets, nostalgia, and the desire to find someone with which you can ride out the waves created by the storm of life. It is from this same storm that we escape each night into our dreams, where we are free to give form to our subconscious: "Everybody’s gone, now we’re all alone” (All Alone). After neon lit car trips through bright city-scapes, flashbacks to fantasy lives never lived and abrupt plunges into memories of the past, the man is woken up by the first rays of the sun - an epiphany. The sunrise of a new day, the courage to embrace the unknown and to be whoever it is you would like to be: “Don’t hide from yourself” (Infinite Scrolling).

Sleep is a concept album that gracefully touches on delicate and universal themes: unhappiness and peer pressure (Yo Tengo), queerness, fear, and dysphoria (Infinite Scrolling), acceptance (Welcome the Night), hesitations about the future (Always Feel the Same/Sunset), Love (Gemini), infidelity (Together in my Dreams), heartbreak (All Alone), anxiety (Subtropical Solitude), depression (Sleep), and salvation (Sunrise).

A troubled meditation on the night, lit by the full moon and glowing milky way (“Could you still stare at me glowing in the dark?” - Gemini), Sleep is the antithesis of the sunlit and carefree afternoon of the duo’s first album Vacation, a debut which was lauded by Noisey, Impose, Rolling Stone and Indie Shuffle, helped the group play impressive shows in Italy and around California, and accumulated hundreds of thousands of Spotify plays and a significant amount of airtime on US college radio.

In the thirteen songs that make up Sleep, Baseball Gregg has finally fully embraced their musical identity and have given life to a mature and totalizing world of music. Sleep was crafted over the course of two long years between California and Italy, and recorded by the duo together in Bolognina in the scorching summer of 2017.

The cover photo was taken by the Thai director and 2010 winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and is part of his series “Power boy” (from Tomorrow for Tonight, Dublin 2011). The artwork flawlessly communicates the empty space, melancholy, and atemporal twilight of Sleep: “Neon lights are shining and my sense of time is slowly fading out.” (Gemini)