Paper Satellites rescue an old track dear to their heart from scrappy/lo-fi/bedroom oblivion into the dream-pop charmer that it is now.
Boredom is a privilege. Long and short of it. An affair you look back on with fondness. That doesn’t get said often enough and maybe it should, especially now. Not everyone has reminiscences tied to inactivity simply because not everyone can afford to take breaks. Else they’d starve to death.
This is why painting a portrait of youth—and the immaculate impatience that comes with it—is akin to pornography. And as boredom porn goes, the new Paper Satellites track “Have Fun Tonight” is quite an orgasmic stab at the pleasures (and pains) of being young, from a small town, and with the wide-open-road laying ahead of you.
The late comic George Carlin once questioned people who are fond of saying “Those were the days,” because, he argued, “Weren’t the nights better?” But I digress. Fun, fluid, and fab, the track certainly fits nocturnal college-age antics like a glove. “[It’s] about being reckless and doing whatever you can to pass the time,” the band says in a statement, recalling how the song first saw life in 2015 while they were students who had “all the time and privilege to be bored.”
Written by former guitarist Paolo Crisostomo, “Have Fun Tonight” is jangle-fest one minute and crippling existentialism the next. Singer-guitarist Jyle Macalintal has that nasal Alex Turner timbre (circa Suck It and See) going on, and his fretwork’s a sort of hat-tip to Johnny Marr’s ringing-open-chord bravado. But it’s bassist Paulo Carpio and drummer Aaron Escueta’s sure-footed cadence (as well as guest singer Priscilla Mendez’s chiming cherry-on-top vocal) that ensures the trance-like reverie stays on-course and within-realm.
“This was the very first song that we [wrote upon] forming Paper Satellites, which is why it holds a special place in our hearts,” the group says, sharing how it has evolved from being “a scrappy lo-fi track made in a bedroom” to the dream-pop charmer that it is now.
Don’t just take their word for it. Stream “Have Fun Tonight” (at any time of day, just to be clear) starting now. It’ll tide you over until their much-awaited debut drops.