Omaha, Nebraska-based singer/songwriter Stavro aches from the inside out in “Smoke Above the Interstate,” a brooding, brutally raw eruption of emotional tumult, inner turmoil, and end times – and the final single taken off his third studio album, ‘You Turning World.’
for fans of Radiohead, Keane, Snow Patrol
“Smoke Above the Interstate” – Stavro
Within Stavro’s latest single is an unsettling sense of angst, anticipation, and doom.
The Omaha, Nebraska-based singer/songwriter aches from the inside out in “Smoke Above the Interstate,” a brooding, brutally raw eruption of emotional tumult and inner turmoil. Fragile and feverish, delicate and dynamic all at once, he’s halfway between a daydream and a nightmare – reckoning with his demons in a stormy song that grows from a low whisper to a radiant roar by its end.
Caught in a maze
Every corner seems the same
Lost in the wake
And a shaking at the gates
And somewhere out there
Somewhere out there
Somewhere out there
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Smoke Above the Interstate,” the second track and final single off Stavro’s upcoming third studio album, You Turning World (independently out October 25th, 2024). Following the past year’s staggered release of “New Year Rushing,” “Everything,” and “What Might It Feel Like?” – each of which served to highlight another side of the alt-rock artist’s multifaceted identity – “Smoke Above the Interstate” is unapologetically haunting and undeniably heartfelt: The musical musings of an emotional wreck.
Slept on the floor
Lying opposite your door
Down on the shore
They are thirsting for the storm
And somewhere out there
Somewhere out there
Tender, turbulent feelings fall from Stavro’s lips and from his guitars as he dwells in a space of ambiguous regret, anxiety, and uncertainty. He might be facing the perceived end of the world, as so many of us did collectively just four short years ago; or it may just be the end of a chapter – a page turn-induced panic, complete with the litany of complex, often contradictory emotions that come with such a change. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all felt the churn within our guts as we feel time escape us; as life passes us by, and we realize some of that existential dread we’ve so often heard others describe.
It’s a dark and bitter rush – a reckoning unlike any we’ve ever felt, and it hits hard and fast.
“‘Smoke Above the Interstate’ is a vision of end times,” Stavro tells Atwood Magazine. “The instrumentation is meant to conjure the feeling of a storm brewing and then unleashing upon the listener. One lyrical theme is confusion: The experience of looking around and finding the motives and desires of the people around you utterly incomprehensible and beyond your grasp.”
“The song is also about personal regret, though. ‘All that time, to sit around and wait,’ and realizing you’re out of time: Your city is already smoking, stone shaking as what C.S. Lewis called ‘The World’s Last Night’ looms. This song is about the moment you realize you’re standing on a precipice, and the bitter clarity that comes with seeing the end of something.”
All that time, to sit around and wait
All that stone, see it begin to shake
All that life, the life you could have made
All that smoke above the interstate
All that time, to sit around and wait
All that might have come around your way
All that talk, to never say a thing
Few songs manage to be simultaneously gentle and coarse, vulnerable and visceral, brooding and anthemic.
“Smoke Above the Interstate” satisfies all of the above, growing steadily from a soft, doleful guitar ballad into a dramatic, charismatic, and cataclysmic (and still anxiety-fueled) indie rock fever dream.
Wisps of Radiohead, Keane, Snow Patrol, Parachutes-era Coldplay, and more poke through the sonic haze; Stavro’s music is uncompromisingly alternative yet deceptively catchy and pop-adjacent, and it is on this track, together with You Turning World’s eleven other songs, that he comes into his own with a striking sense of self.
“This album is me reveling in the things that fire me up the most as a music-lover: Visceral and infectious instrumentation, vivid atmospherics, and storytelling,” Stavro says of his upcoming LP. “C.S. Lewis once said to J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘If they won’t write the kinds of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves.’ My only goal with this record was to write something that I myself found compelling. And I still get excited when I put it on.”
You saw it coming
but it came too quick
You saw it coming
but it came and went
Whether you yourself are bracing for your own end times, or you’re simply ready to get caught up in the next great musical wave, “Smoke Above the Interstate” is an intimate upheaval worth the journey and the emotional toll.
Stream Stavro’s latest single exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and be sure to give his third album You Turning World a listen upon its global release.
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:: stream/purchase You Turning World here ::
:: connect with Stavro here ::
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“Smoke Above the Interstate” – Stavro
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