Oakland quartet mildred trace the eerie warmth of memory, friendship, and shared authorship on “Trailer Hitch,” a softly spellbinding alt-country reverie that anchors their twin EPs ‘mild’ and ‘red’ as intimate portraits of a young band learning how to live inside uncertainty together.

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There’s a warm light flickering inside mildred’s “Trailer Hitch,” glowing through the fog like a lantern someone left burning for you.

Dreamy and dusted with grit, the Oakland band’s alt-country reverie feels both feverish and soft-spoken, hypnotizing in its drift and quietly devastating in its emotional undercurrent. It’s the kind of song whose softness can take over a whole room, settling in the air like a long exhale you didn’t realize you were holding, filling the space with a slow, stirring ache you don’t fully feel until it’s already deep in your chest.

What mildred do so beautifully here is balance the familiar with the slightly surreal. The indie rock quartet of singers and songwriters Jack Schrott, Henry Easton Koehler, Matt Palmquist, and Will Fortna work in textures that feel worn and lived in, yet there is a haze hanging over everything, as though the song is unfolding inside a memory you are trying to hold steady. Schrott’s voice drifts like someone singing through a fever dream, and the band wraps him in a soft scrim of guitar, dust, breath, and hush. The effect is softly spellbinding: A song that moves like headlights passing through Montana fog, carrying tender dread, worn out joy, and all the unspoken ghosts tucked into its imagery.

I jumped into the little pond
There I was looking at the big frog
Knock off Hall brand cough drop
Dead eyes, thumbs up, oh god

Talking to the wall about grandma
Talking to the fog about grandpa

mildred have spent this first year of their recorded life sketching out a world that feels both intimate and expansive, beginning with this October’s mild and now continuing with its companion EP red. The Northern California foursome have technically been playing together far longer – first as friends, then as roommates, then as a band almost by accident – but these two twin EPs mark their first true steps into the wider world. mild gathered the softer, rounder edges of their songwriting, while red leans into something a little sharper, a little more angular, a little more haunted by the strange beauty of their shared imagination. “Trailer Hitch,” written more recently than many of the tracks that appear across both releases, feels like a bridge between where they started and where they are headed, capturing the early spark of a band finding its footing and its voice all at once.

The story behind “Trailer Hitch” is as evocative as the song itself. The seed came from a trip the band took to Will’s family cabin in Montana, where antlers and taxidermy perched above them and a broken trailer hitch sat in the yard like an omen. There was a pond. There was stillness. There was a sense that the familiar had tilted just enough to feel strange. “I think the song is about the eeriness that can well up and make familiar elements of your life look suddenly a little deformed,” mildred share. “The feeling that something is coming to an end, but not knowing what that thing is.”

That mood resonated with the Kelly Reichardt film Old Joy, which threads through the song like a ghost. The climactic line from the movie, sorrow is just worn out joy, appears in the lyrics because it felt true to the emotional fog the band found themselves in. Old Joy is about friendship, distance, longing, and the subtle ache of realizing that something once shared has shifted shape. “Trailer Hitch” lives in that same liminal space. A place where nostalgia and melancholy blur, where connection feels fragile, where the landscape around you becomes a mirror for whatever you are afraid to name.

Interstitial, interstitial something
Iiiiiiii, when the trailer hitch breaks,
interstitial something
Iiiiiiii, when the trailer hitch breaks,
interstitial something

The lyrics drift between specificity and dream logic, capturing the strange poetry that rises out of stillness. Everything feels slightly tilted, slightly too vivid. You can feel the fever under the taxidermy.

What makes mildred such a compelling young band is their creative democracy.

They call themselves four singers, four songwriters, and four equal parts, a line that feels both literal and spiritual. Each member writes songs before surrendering them to the group, allowing the band to mold them cooperatively until the final version becomes something fully shared. “Playing together is the most important part of our creative process,” they explain. “Barely fleshed out songs that slowly get finished through multiple practices, or until the other bandmates force the main writer to finish a song we like.” That camaraderie is audible in every line of “Trailer Hitch.” You can hear the trust. You can hear the ease. You can hear the way these songs breathe because they were born in living rooms and stitched together between dinners.

Compared to the softer, more rounded edges of their debut EP mild, the songs on its companion EP red feel a little sharper, a little more angular, a little less melancholic. “Trailer Hitch” was written more recently than some of the older tracks that appear on the two releases, and mildred note that it points toward the newer spaces they have been exploring. If mild captures the gentler beginnings, red is the flicker of heat that follows. Both EPs trace the arc of a young band finding its footing and figuring out where their collective voice wants to go.

Floating through that room
after a pure sweat
Twelve point buck
dropped lung dead
Picturing you curled up
on the couch close
Polypropylene sleeved photos

To want to come apart and have you hold me
To want to feel that you can feel the same thing
He buttoned up his coat then looked back
Sorrow’s just worn out joy,
I won’t forget that

“Trailer Hitch” sits in the center of that arc like a glowing anchor. It is eerie, tender, and deeply human. It is the feeling of walking across a dark field toward a porch light and not being sure what you will find when you get there. It is the fog of grief and the warmth of memory. It is the ache that comes from knowing something is shifting even when you cannot say what.

And maybe that is why the song hits so deeply. It does not try to resolve its own uncertainty. It just inhabits it. Softly. Grittily. Beautifully. “Trailer Hitch” captures mildred at their most evocative and their most human, and it stands as one of the year’s most quietly arresting songs.

With its fog-soft imagery, shared authorship, and quiet emotional gravity, “Trailer Hitch” feels less like a single song than an open doorway into mildred’s world – one shaped by friendship, memory, and the strange beauty that emerges when the familiar begins to slip. To understand how that world came together, and where it’s headed next, we sat down with mildred to talk about beginnings, balance, and the eerie warmth that lives at the heart of their music.

Iiiiiiii, when the trailer hitch breaks,
interstitial something
Iiiiiiii, when the trailer hitch breaks,
interstitial something

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Stream: “Trailer Hitch” – mildred

A CONVERSATION WITH MILDRED

mildred: Well, people keep telling us that we’re, “like…a real band”. We don’t really know what to make of this, but it might have something to do with how we all write songs for Mildred and we’ve been playing together for a long time casually as friends. We hope you can hear the camaraderie but at the very least this is something readers should know so they don’t get confused when hearing different voices singing different songs.

mildred: We like these songs, and they represent the early germination of what eventually became our band. In that way, they feel important to us. When we first started recording them, we were really just friends who thought we might play a couple of backyard shows around town. Now that writing, recording, and playing as Mildred has become a bigger part of our lives, these EPs feel like an important record of where we started.

mildred: Too many to list but some all timers: Late era Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Silver Jews, Stephen Malkmus/Pavement, Michael Hurley, The Replacements

mildred: Playing together is the most important part of our creative process. Barely fleshed out songs/melodies/chord progressions that slowly get finished through multiple practices, or until other bandmates force the main writer to finish a song we like.

mildred: The imagery in the song came from a trip a few of us took to Will’s family cabin in Montana. Some of his relatives are hunters so there were antlers and taxidermy looming around. There was a broken trailer hitch, there was a little pond. I think the song is about the eeriness that can well up and make familiar elements of your life look suddenly a little deformed. The feeling that something is coming to an end, but not knowing what that thing is? The other backdrop to the song is Old Joy, which is this movie about two friends in Portland reconnecting and going on a trip to Bagby Hotsprings near Mt. Hood. One of the characters is starting a family and has a job he likes. The other (Will Oldham) has been wandering through life a bit more, is a bit lost. They have this weekend which is a tangle of feeling the loss of a shared past, annoyance from old frictions, abandonment, jealousy… The climactic line from the movie is “sorrow is just worn out joy,” which is in the song. Somehow it felt connected. Being from Portland, there’s a grey, mossyness that’s very familiar. The song came somewhere in the fog between these things!

mildred: Many of the songs from the EPs predate the band quite a bit (at least their basic concept). In the early days we were just amalgamating old parts people had laying around and adapting them in the context of the band. On the other hand, “Trailer Hitch” was written more recently, maybe around the time the band idea was concretizing and just before we recorded. I think it has a toe dipped in some of the newer spaces we’ve explored since then, which maybe feels true of Red in general as compared to Mild? It feels like it applies to other tracks on Red like “Carry On.” It’s definitely not clear cut though! “Green Car” on Mild was probably the newest of all the songs on the EPs. “Sauvie’s Nude Beach” and “Grown Boy” on Red are among the oldest. Maybe we should have swapped the places of “Green Car” and one of those so the narrative would be cleaner.

mildred: We didn’t think these songs constituted an album, but we wanted to release all of them. That’s where the ideas for the EPs originally stemmed from. Then we had the idea for the two EP names (“mild” and “red”) and the songs we put on red felt more red to us. A little more bite, less melancholy maybe? It was mostly just a feeling.

mildred: We hope people enjoy the tune and the rest of Red. We’re also excited to share more music soon.

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