ZOON has shared ‘OMNI II’, the latest single from their forthcoming album ‘Happy Thought School’, out June 19 via Paper Bag Records.

The track follows earlier singles ‘One Too Many Nights’ featuring Sam Jr. and ‘I Was Younger’, and gives another glimpse of where Daniel Monkman is taking ZOON this time. The sound is still dreamlike and blurred at the edges, but there is a pop instinct running through it too, with melody and memory pulled into the same space.

For ‘OMNI II’, Monkman worked with Chris Chu, formerly of The Morning Benders. Monkman says Chu’s work on ‘Big Echo’ helped point them towards “some of that pop and lo-fi influence.”

The song deals with heartbreak not as one clean moment, but as something that keeps replaying in the mind. “Heartbreak slips through your hands like sand if you don’t hold it carefully,” Monkman says. “‘OMNI II’ is merely playing the tape childhood, love, loss over and over until it becomes melody. It’s chaotic memory turning into structure. That’s how I survive it.”

That idea sits at the centre of ‘Happy Thought School’, ZOON’s third full-length album. The record looks back at difficult personal history, including heartbreak, relapse, racism and spiritual rebuilding, but it does not treat those things as fixed wounds. Instead, Monkman turns them into sound: tape hiss, soft-focus pop, shoegaze haze and the moccasin-gaze language they have been shaping since ‘Bleached Wavves’.

The album title refers to a school in East Selkirk, Manitoba, where Monkman has said they experienced racism as one of the only Native students. Pop music became a refuge during that time, and ‘Happy Thought School’ seems to hold both sides of that memory at once: the brightness of the songs, and the pain sitting underneath them.

Headline photo: Vanessa Heins

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