There’s a moment in ‘Alice’ when everything drops out except a thin, trembling signal, like a radio tower blinking into dead space. Then the band kicks the door back in. It’s not subtle. It’s not meant to be.

Portland’s Morrison Graves have always sounded like they’re playing at the edge of something collapsing, but ‘Alice’ feels different. The song opens on a community in shock, their hero gone in a flash, their guiding light reduced to cosmic dust. The transmission cuts. Silence. You can almost see the faces turned skyward, waiting for a reply that doesn’t come. So what now? Who steps up? Is there a plan B, or do we just drift?

That tension runs straight through the track. Fuzz bleeding into reverb, pulling from 60s psych and garage but twisting it through darker corridors. There’s a hint of Eastern modes in the melody, a circling feel that never quite settles. It’s heavy without plodding, trippy without floating away.

If you caught their debut, ‘Division Rising,’ you’ll recognize the instinct to confront rather than escape. Released in the middle of lockdown, that record took on gentrification, homelessness, and the widening cracks in the American promise. It wasn’t polite about it. That album gave Morrison Graves an audience for saying the uncomfortable part out loud.

Then the world reopened and the project turned into a proper live band. That shift changed the chemistry. You can hear it in ‘Alice.’ The track sets the tone for their upcoming EP, ‘Under The Weight of Gravity,’ their first post-pandemic release. The new material digs into tribalism, resource hunger, the global war machine, the quiet slide toward civil conflict.

<a href="https://morrisongraves.bandcamp.com/album/alice-single">Alice – Single by Morrison Graves</a>

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