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May 29, 2024 By Caleb Campbell

Austin-based indie folk outfit Under The Rug have been on a prolific run of releases, beginning with their 2022 sophomore LP Dear Adeline and continuing with their third full-length record, Homesick for Another World, released last year. They’re keeping that pace up this year with a massive 30-track double album, happiness is easy. The first part of the record releases on August 16th, and today they’re sharing the album’s lead single, “mad girl’s love song,” premiering with Under the Radar.

Lead singer Casey Dayan describes happiness is easy as “the least fictional thing I’ve written.” The record sees her removing layers of abstraction from her songwriting in favor of startlingly personal explorations of identity and the self. In that vein, “mad girl’s love song” finds Dayan adapting Sylvia Plath’s titular poem, turning a variation of its opening stanza into an obsessive mantra: “I shut my eyes and all the world it drops dead / I lift my lids and it all emerges again / I think I made you up inside my head.” Later, she questions “How could you truly know me / How could you truly understand me the way that I am?” All along, the band swirls in the background, settling into the track’s elliptical refrain only to explode into motion with a tense, churning bridge and galloping finale.

Dayan says of the track, “This song is an homage to Sylvia Plath’s eponymous villanelle, which I’ve always admired. I wanted to write something new from it, or inspired by it, without strictly using her language in a derivative way. Sylvia’s poem, to me, at least, feels like it’s about a character’s relationship to an imagined version of someone and the expectations that character superimposes onto them. The dissonance between those expectations and reality drives the character mad.”

She continues, saying “In our song, things had to move differently. The speaker is more concerned with the dissonance between who they are and how the expectations the ‘you’ might have of THEM. It feels true to me, as a trans person, who is often being interpreted on the internet.”

Check out the song below, along with the band’s upcoming tour dates. Happiness is easy part 1 is due out on August 16th.

Tour Dates:

8/29 - Valley Bar - Phoenix, AZ

8/31 - Venice West - Los Angeles, CA

9/1 - Soda Bar - San Diego, CA

9/6 - Brick & Mortar - San Francisco, CA

9/7 - Goldfield Trading Post - Sacramento, CA

9/9 - Madame Lou’s - Seattle, WA

9/10 - The Showdown - Portland, OR

9/12 - Kilby Court - Salt Lake City, UT

9/13 - The Coast - Fort Collins, CO

9/14 - Black Buzzard - Denver, CO

9/17 - Blueberry Hill - St. Louis, MO

9/19 - 7th Street - Minneapolis, MN

9/20 - Beat Kitchen - Chicago, IL

9/21 - The Sanctuary - Detroit, MI

9/25 - Healer - Indianapolis, IN

9/26 - Shank Hall - Milwaukee, WI

9/27 - The Basement - Columbus, OH

9/28 - Beachland Tavern - Cleveland, OH

9/29 - Club Cafe - Pittsburgh, PA

10/2 - The Rockwell - Boston, MA

10/3 - Knitting Factory - New York, NY

10/4 - Silk City - Philadelphia, PA

10/5 - Pie Shop - Washington, DC

10/8 - Cannery - Row One - Nashville, TN

10/9 - Eddie’s Attic - Atlanta, GA

10/10 - Evening Muse - Charlotte, NC

10/11 - Royal American - Charleston, SC

10/17 - Sundown at Granada - Dallas, TX

10/19 - Mohawk (Indoors) - Austin, TX