I’ve always been weak for a specific kind of person, the one who walks into a room already lit a little wrong, the one your friends warn you about in the bathroom while you’re reapplying lipstick and only half listening. I have a documented history of mistaking danger for chemistry and then acting shocked at the wreckage. The worst ones wait for you to do the walking. They let you arrive at them and call it your own idea, and by the time you clock what’s happening you’ve already handed over your better judgment and the password to at least one streaming account. Awake & Dreaming built a whole song inside that feeling, the pull toward someone who plays a controlled substance you keep swearing you can handle. I put it on once and understood I was the target audience. God help me.
Here’s the thing this band does to you. They start so quiet you lean in, just piano and Sasha Kristoff’s voice up close like she’s telling you something she shouldn’t. You get comfortable. Then the distortion starts bleeding in around the edges and you barely notice until the whole thing kicks the doors down and you’re standing in arena-sized guitars wondering how you got there. That slow creep is the entire seduction and it works on me every fucking time. Jay Dufour mixed it and he let the soft parts stay soft enough to feel like a confession so when it finally blows up it actually wrecks you. João Carvalho mastered it, the same guy who finished records already sitting in your collection, and the low end is heavy enough to make the whole thing feel like a bad decision in progress.
Advertisement
She’s already caught when the song starts, and she’s not mad about it. “Caught in a spider’s web / Flashes across my head / I just want your attention / Come and set me free.” What gets me is she’s not clawing to get out of the web. She wants him watching her while she’s stuck in it. That’s the dead honest center of this kind of wanting, and anybody who’s ever craved somebody bad for them knows the feeling. You don’t want saving. You want an audience while you make the mess.
Then she says the quiet part with her whole throat. “Take me into the dark / Away from prying eyes / Wrap me in threads of silver / Keep me under your spell.” That’s a woman asking to be pulled somewhere private and tied up in silk, and she says it right out loud with the lights on. The silver threads are the spider’s silk and they’re also the thing you’re picturing, and the song knows full well what it’s doing to you. A voice doing that over guitars this heavy could talk me into things I’d be fucking lying about by brunch. I spent a whole summer once swearing a man with that energy was a phase. He was a felony in slow motion. Moving on.
The chorus is where she just admits she’s hooked. “Maybe you’re the antidote / To all of this poison inside of me / Maybe you’re the antidote / I need you more than anything / You’re what I crave.” She’s calling this dangerous man her cure, the fix for the chaos already screaming around her head, which is the oldest shit every one of us has told ourselves about the people who wreck us best. The whole thing turns on that “maybe.” She has no clue whether he saves her or finishes the job, and not knowing is the reason she can’t put the phone down. Wanting somebody who might be your medicine or your overdose is a feeling most of us have paid for, usually more than once.
She goes under again in the second verse and it gets darker. “Lost in a hazy crowd / Dizzy and out of focus / Will you come rescue me? / I’m still breathing.” That dizziness is attraction and it’s also something slipped in a drink, and the song won’t tell you which, because it’s both. She asks to be rescued and makes sure you know she hasn’t gone down yet. There’s a stubborn little pulse in that breathing, a woman keeping one eye cracked open while she lets herself sink, and that wrecks me harder than any straight-up swoon would. The half-awake part is the hot part.
Advertisement
Then she pulls the rug out. “Waiting near the door / Watching so unassuming / Are you a predator too? / Hunting me, hunting you.” That one question rearranges the whole song behind it. She’s been the prey this whole time and now she’s letting you wonder if she’s been hunting his ass right back, watching him from the doorway with the same patience he used to reel her in. The outro leaves her on that one defiant breath and never tells you who caught whom. Two predators circling a dark room, both playing victim. That’s the hottest standoff I’ve heard on a record in ages.
Awake & Dreaming are the Canadian four-piece making dark art-rock with the budget and ambition of a band already headlining in their heads, and the receipts back it the hell up. Sasha Kristoff runs the front in sequined gowns on vocals and keys while Stefan Schneider, Phil Lee, and Ryan Dugal build the storm behind her, and they design and run their own synchronized lighting because of course they do. They opened three nights for Carole Pope this past March, including a set at Toronto’s storied El Mocambo, and played rooms from the CNE to The Delancey in New York while racking up seventeen press reviews across six countries with nobody pushing them. Their debut album Inevitable arrives this summer, a hell of a name to slap on a record after years of making the case for it. They sound expensive because they bet on themselves before anybody else would.
I still fall for the ones lit a little wrong. I’ve made peace with it, mostly, the way you make peace with a weakness you’ve quit pretending you’ll outgrow. What this song gets that nobody says out loud is that the wanting was always the point, that not knowing whether he saves you or sinks you is the thing that keeps you knocking on his door at an hour you’ll lie about tomorrow. Awake & Dreaming scored my worst impulse and made it sound like the best night of my life. I’d take the web again. I’d probably hand over the streaming password too.
