“Blame” It on Miki Berenyi To Make Blushing’s New Single Soar (KEXP Premiere)

While the UK Parliament is currently, right at this moment, drafting an online safety bill with the premise that Facebook is “unquestionably making hate worse,” the only slightly better platform Twitter is responsible for merging the talents of an Austin-based band with their shoegaze idol. When the double couple quartet Blushing tweeted out to Miki Berenyi of Lush/Piroshka in 2018, after covering “Out of Control” for a Lush covers compilation, they didn’t expect Berenyi to slide into their DMs and agree to work with them. Now, three years later, the collaboration made in dream pop heaven has arrived.

Berenyi’s celestial croons mingle effortlessly with Michelle Soto and Christina Carmona’s wispy lilts that beckon us to “stick around and find out” on “Blame,” the lead single off Blushing’s forthcoming follow-up to their 2019 self-titled debut. With a rush of woozy reverberating guitar and cascading drum crashes that would make Emma Anderson and the late Chris Acland respectively proud, Noe Carmona and Jacob Soto fill out the Lush-like single with aplomb.

Titled Possessions, the pandemic-produced album is due out in February 2022 via Brooklyn-based label Kanine Records and features production from Ringo Deathstarr frontman and fellow Austinite Elliott Frazier. But if you thought we were done dropping names of shoegaze idols involved in the making of the record, then you thought wrong, because none other than Mark Gardener of the seminal shoegaze outfit Ride put the finishing touches on the record with his mastering magic.

The band had this to say about “Blame”:

Blushing will be playing SXSW 2022 when it takes over the streets of Austin, Texas in March. Listen to “Blame” below.