James Wyatt Crosby’s new single, “And the Sky,” might be my favorite song of 2026 so far. This tune has been on repeat, accompanying me through house chores, on the bus, and walking around Seattle. The track effectively combines elements of slowcore, dream pop, and lo-fi rock, culminating in a sound that harkens back to bands like Spiritualized and early Broken Social Scene, only slightly less propulsive and anthemic. Instead, Crosby opts for a song that “unfolds gradually, sitting between song and soundscape.” The “songscape” lives in this liminal space, making for a perfect backdrop to February.
In a winter season wherein the music ecosystem (see Spotify) is inundated with AI for content creation, production, and even curation, songscapes are the antidote. This one in particular captures what the writer calls “love’s fragile persistence amid inevitable change,” and this fragility belies a uniquely human and arguably humane approach to songwriting and music production. After all, while the sun may never set on Spotify and its omniscient Algorithm, which continues to accelerate the energy crisis alongside water scarcity (what Crosby calls “the end of days”), it is no surprise that the music at the center of this platform becomes more and more limited, familiar, and uniform. The all-mighty Algorithm curates the most popular playlists and discovery modes, and human curators select music based on what they hope the Algorithm will “pick up” and play ad infinitum. Producers produce toward the same end, and the narrowing aperture of what even constitutes music–and certainly what gets played–only continues to shrink. Platforms like Bandcamp take an admirable and costly stance against the machine, but who knows for how long they will be able to hold out.
It is in this climate that “And the Sky” comes to us. When describing his process, Crosby insists that these songs might not even be “fully ‘finished’ in the traditional sense,” but “rather than rebuild them into something cleaner or more presentable… he let them stay rough and a little unresolved.” In the second verse, he sings, “And the sky is grey/ It’s the end of days/ Everyone’s asleep/ Everyone’s awake.” As the saying goes, the apocalypse is nigh, and the singer, like the listener, is caught between sleep and wakefulness, song and soundscape. The track even sounds like a dream, constructed from the imagination of an artist uninterested in the Algorithm or someone else’s idea of what a “finished” song should or should not be. It is the first single from Crosby’s forthcoming album Goner, out May 1. I cannot recommend it enough.
Written by SilenceKid
