Your Car Stereo Has Been Waiting for Sweet Nobody’s DRIVING OFF TO NOWHERE

When I tune my radio to 88.9 FM, it doesn’t come in clearly in East Hollywood. KXLU is a tricky beast, SoCal’s best and most eclectic radio station, and one that varies in sound and texture—both technologically and ideologically. Sometimes I’ll be driving around late at night, flip from my iPhone to good ‘ol college radio, and wonder if what I’m hearing is either a hazy field recording that some Loyola Marymount University sophomore thought would be a good midnight vibe shift or a genuinely poor signal that’s successfully presenting itself as artful many miles from the antenna. Frankly though, it doesn’t matter: KXLU is the best. 

One unseasonably warm morning in October, I was driving in Los Angeles and heard Sweet Nobody’s “I Don’t Know When I’ll See You Again” vibrating through KXLU’s signal, a song from their latest album DRIVING OFF TO NOWHERE that through the light static sounded like a dispatch from both the past and present. The Long Beach indie pop group’s tone was already one fitting for vintage feedback, a fusion of ‘60s teenage rock ‘n’ roll and internet era twee pop colliding into one; “Forget Me” hits like a Mitski B-Side, “Revenge” and “Could You Be The One” run wild with lo-fi surf pop rhythms, and “Finally Free” builds from unassuming cooing to huge synths and galloping drum machines (perhaps the band’s most realized sound to date). 

Sweet Nobody have been kicking around the SoCal indie scene for a while—2021’s underrated WE’RE TRYING OUR BEST and, to a lesser extent, their 2017 debut LOUD SONGS FOR QUIET PEOPLE, were both the type of summer bummer indie rock that Best Coast and Wavves had popularized and perhaps polarized at the turn of the 2010s. But the highlights from the former, notably “Not a Good Judge” and “Young in Love,” are strong throughlines to their latest. DRIVING OFF TO NOWHERE is better heard on early mornings or late evenings through a fuzzy FM tuner or hissing car stereo than the lossless audio of your modern DSP. But regardless of how you hear it, their brand of blissed-out jangle pop has only continued to grow and evolve across three albums, and this latest is perhaps their best to date—trust me, if “I Don’t Know When I’ll See You Again” plays for you at 8:23 a.m. on the corner of Hollywood and Normandie, you’ll have the same thought. Driving off to nowhere indeed.

You can hear an early taste of Sweet Nobody’s DRIVING OFF TO NOWHERE below!

Be sure to grab a copy of the new record via Repeating Cloud over on Bandcamp, and follow the band over on Instagram!