V.V. Lightbody premieres Two Swans from the album Period Piece

V.V. Lightbody has put out Two Swans, the fourth song to be released from her third album. Period Piece arrives on 9 October through Egghunt Records, following the singles Best Problem, Practice Smiling and Dull Knife, and this one came out as a premiere through Under the Radar.

The song is about reading signs that are not there. Lightbody says that anywhere she saw two swans it felt like a comforting message that she was doing something right, until she started seeing them so often that she remembered swans are usually drawn in pairs anyway. The lyric pokes at magical thinking while admitting she still enjoys the practice.

She has a phrase for how it sounds: Cate Le Bon, but in a cornfield. What she means is angular guitars, a chorus in mixed meter and what she calls a raging farfisa, an organ sound that gives the track its bite. She describes the song as deeply Chicago, which in her account is a matter of rhythm as much as reference.

Under the Radar hears it as dreamy and lightly psychedelic, with twirling vocal melodies over instrumentation that keeps changing its footing. The palette is ordinary enough, guitars and organ and drums, but the phrasing is not: the arrangement swells and recedes, and a winding solo in the middle tips the whole thing into something closer to art pop than folk.

Lightbody's day job has been on other people's records. She is an in-demand collaborator on the Chicago indie scene, having played on work by FINOM, Cassandra Jenkins and Whitney, and that session background is audible in how much room she leaves in her own arrangements.

Her own catalogue started in 2018 with Bathing Peach and continued with Make a Shrine or Burn It in 2020. Period Piece is the first record in six years, which for a musician who has been busy the whole time is a gap explained by other people's sessions rather than by silence.

Stereogum also covered the song on the day, which puts two US outlets on a release that would ordinarily travel on a label mailout alone. For an artist whose name is better known in credits than on marquees, that is the kind of coverage that moves a record.

Period Piece is now on the release calendar for October. Our indie coverage of Chicago releases this year includes Lalah Hathaway's 47th Street, and other songwriters have taken a similar route out from behind the credits, among them Dummy signing to Polyvinyl with an album lined up.