Both successful musicians in their own right, Tony Molina and Sarah Rose Janko first met at a memorial for a mutual friend, and from there ended up forming The Lost Days. While not the most traditional place to strike up a musical bond, that’s exactly what happened, the pair bonded over their shared grief and started spending evenings together playing guitar and singing, “to an audience of empty wine bottles”, in Sarah’s East Oakland warehouse. Deciding these sonic sketches deserved a home, the pair set about forming the demos that would become their debut release, Lost Demos, which they shared back in 2021. After Sarah relocated to New Orleans, and a certain pandemic kept them from sharing a studio, Tony started penning the songs that would become the band’s first album, sending them across the country with Sarah’s voice in mind. As normality started to come into view, the pair descended on their friend Nick Bassett’s basement studio, and over time, working both together and apart, created their debut record, In The Store. With the record out in March via Speakeasy Studios SF, a new label run by friend Alicia Vanden Heuvel of the Aislers Set, today the band are premiering the record’s stunning title track.

The track is a deep dive into themes of dependency and obsession, in particular the difficulty of coping with those when your drug of choice, alcohol, is widely available and socially acceptable. As the band explain, “corner stores are everywhere, and the array of bottled options to the drinker are ever present”. This ubiquitous temptation is hammered home in the lyric, “drowning a hole, but you can’t see… that all the things that I despise stare back at me”, hitting on the difficult journey to self-worth and alcoholism’s tendency to pull us away from it as it lurks around every corner and in every shop you pass by.

The lyrical struggles sit in sweet contrast to the musical journey, sure The Lost Days might be taking you to the bottom of a stack of bottles, but they know how to do it with a bit of style. Atop a particularly wonderful bass line, they treat us to layers of jangling rhythm guitars, soaring Hammond organ and a slow motion guitar-solo, the whole thing offering a subtle nod to The Beatles’ classic, Don’t Let Me Down with a west-coast folk-pop makeover.

The track is accompanied by a cinema verité style video, shot on black and white super 8 and directed by Alicia Vanden Heuvel, showing us a day in the life of someone who lives from one drink to the next, which you can check out below.

In The Store is out March 17th via Speakeasy Studios SF. For more information on The Lost Days visit https://thelostdays.bandcamp.com/.