Two years after the initial hit release of Dizzy’s debut album, Baby Teeth, the band is back with The Sun and Her Scorch; yet another evocative album, all soft vibes and scorching lyrics.
Katie Munshaw, frontwoman of the band explains in several interviews, “I wanted to be completely honest about the things nobody ever wants to admit, like being jealous of your friends or pushing away the people who love you.” 1 Katie later goes onto explain that this album focuses on self-heartbreak rather than romantic heartbreak.
The Sun and Her Scorch brings on the late-night suburbia and lush retro vibes from Baby Teeth but while Baby Teeth dealt with themes of adolescence, heartbreak and sadness of late teenage years, TSAHS explores the big, messy themes of young adulthood and growing up, questioning mortality and stability of life. The album has fuller and more hopeful vibes than their former album, which Munshaw explains in Liner Notes, a new ongoing Q&A series with the band, comes from the fact that they produced the album entirely on their own.
Frontwoman Katie Munshaw, vocalist Charlie Spencer and instrumentalists Alex and Mackenzie Spencer draw inspiration from the sleepy suburbs of their hometown. Munshaw explains that the biggest moments in her life did not happen at romantic beaches or crowded subways, but at Mcdonalds at 2 AM in the morning or partying at a friend’s late at night. The quartet continues to encapsulate the dreamy and retro suburban vibe perfectly in their newest album.
The album starts off with Worms. A song that sets up perfectly the vibe of the later songs, as Katie Munshaw explains: “Worms’ felt sort of like a theme for the record: This song is like a hand coming out from the earth, reaching out to the listener and grabbing them, and bringing them down to this world of The Sun and Her Scorch. ‘Worms’ signifies this feeling of being underground and feeling trapped and suffocated.” 2 And surely, the themes of trapped and suffocation are apparent in the song, along with death and loss, as reflected in the lyrics: Shine your light down to me / And I'll cling to it / I've been sleeping with the worms / I got used to it
Next comes the fan-favourite lead-single of the album: Sunflower, ‘a three and a half minute ‘snap out of it!’ to me when I’m feeling low, unconfident or not myself kind of song’. Although Munshaw claims she doesn’t write poetry or prose, you can’t look over the funky images and specific word-choice she uses. Right from the start of the song, Munshaw’s genius lyrics’ shine through. Take me to the roof / I wanna hear the sound / Of what a broken heart does / When I fling it to the ground. Throughout the song, Munshaw’s odd but effective wording combos pattern out, vocally and lyrically reflecting the vivid but weird images and thoughts that come to us when we sleep. The lyrics are questioning, heavy and odd but they pair perfectly with the hopeful, retro instrumentals, creating a striking balance.
"How do you think you'll die?" The album’s third song Good and Right starts with the question we’ve all asked ourselves at least once. While the lyrics are heavy, the song still remains hopeful with the chorus, I hope it’s good and right. Katie Munshaw explains the process behind the song: “I came up with that opening line while I was walking to my job one day, and it was in my voice notes for a long time, and Charlie [Spencer, drummer] had a demo and I put it over top. There’s just something really magical that happens sometimes in a band where somebody has an idea and then another idea from someone else just fits perfectly over top of it.” She goes onto explain her reasoning for the themes of death in this song, which fit perfectly with the overarching album’s questioning of growing up. She says, “One of those things that I learned that I can write about—and one that I am freaking out about constantly—is death, and realizing that I’m getting older, and that’s exactly what this song is about. It’s also about being afraid of the unknown. I wasn’t raised religiously, so this song is me wondering what happens after all this.” 3
The fourth installment of the album truly brings magic to Munshaw’s words. “The magician is about wanting to magically bring a friend who passed away back to life,” Katie says. "To me, the song reeks of naivety and innocence in a way that really hurts my heart. Hoping she’ll walk into my gig at the local pub, hoping to see her mom at Sobeys just to remember how similar their laughs were. Hoping for magic. It’s a really emotional song for me but is masked by tricky, pretty production to make it sound almost joyful." 4 You can really see this clearly through her lyrics. “You be the girl behind the crates,” and later “You be the bird behind the drapes.” Birds could symbolize heaven and crate, a coffin. After each of the lyrics, Munshaw sings And I’ll be the Magician further reiterating the theme of a passing of a friend and wanting to bring them back.
Beatrice, the next song in the album, is named after a street in Oshawa. The band stars the suburbian, Streetly vibes in several lyrics. On the pavement, I spill my guts / A crowd's watching but I won't shut up and They dim the lights and the music plays / But you catch your cab and walk away. These things go by on the streets, something often left unnoticed but Dizzy draws on that feeling of small moments that go unnoticed while your whole world falls apart. ‘Beatrice’ is a street in Oshawa, but the song is largely fiction,” Katie says, “We wrote it really early on when I was still trying to write romantic heartbreak songs, and everything was coming out really ingenuine. To crack it, I had to tap into relationships around me. My best friend was going through a breakup, my parents were separating, and I just kind of drew from their experiences at the time. So this song is a mash-up of their relationships falling apart.” 5
And indeed falling apart is a theme prominent in the next 5 installments. Roman Candles struggles with insecurities about pursuing music as a job and a passion and that fearful thought of letting go. Lefty deals with a more left-sided look to a relationship, exploring toxicity and complete obsession and infatuation in a relationship to the point it becomes unhealthy. Katie Munshaw explains that she wanted to portray all the different sides of a relationship. She says, while this may be a love song, it is something that comes with adulthood, to learn to have a sense of independence while being in a relationship. In Primrose Hill, Katie explains: “We were on tour in London and had a night off, so we went out with a friend of ours from a band in London and we drank a lot and I had a few too many and said a lot of things that night that I felt really guilty about the next morning. So this song is really about guilt and remorse and treating the people you love so awfully, and them just loving you anyway. That’s what the bridge with pitched-down vocals is about: ‘Anywhere you go, I’ll be there to dote’ is sort of like that person who loves you and is saying, ‘It’s okay,’ and they’re accepting your apology.” 6 Next comes Daylight Savings Time, a song about the fear and depression of time passing. “This song is about depression and thinking that it’s seasonal, and then when the year turns around and it’s summertime again, you realize that maybe it wasn’t seasonal and maybe there’s something more to it than that.” 7 The penultimate song, Ten, is where the album titles originate from, a song about growing old and that fear of losing loved ones. “Ten is about being in love with somebody and realizing that people die—you can grow old and have a really wonderful long life with someone, but you die alone. In the song, the lyric ‘the sun and her scorch’ is meant to just reference the sun and its actual heat. But in relation to the record, it was a pretty good metaphor for myself and all the ways that I’m harmful or mean to people around me. And I think every song on this record is just battling these patterns in myself that I don’t really like.” 8
The album loops closed with the starter song Worms ll. The album explored the themes of pain and adulthood and growing up, genuinely sharing Katie’s own experiences, giving a messy but honest look into life. If you’ve ever had dreams of all your teeth falling out, then this album is for you.
IN-QUOTE CITATIONS.
https://royalmountainrecords.com/collections/dizzy by Royal Mountain Records
https://genius.com/Dizzy-worms-lyrics Inside Scoop by Genius Lyrics
https://genius.com/Dizzy-good-and-right-lyrics Inside Scoop by Genius Lyrics
https://genius.com/Dizzy-the-magician-lyrics Inside Scoop by Genius Lyrics
https://genius.com/Dizzy-beatrice-lyrics Inside Scoop by Genius Lyrics
https://genius.com/Dizzy-primrose-hill-lyrics Inside Scoop by Genius Lyrics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHuGRZV7sa4 Liner Notes by Dizzy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9518ynzEZJI Liner Notes by Dizzy
Mashal Ashfaq
first ventured into the world of writing with her sister. Since then, she has gone to explore different genres and styles: short fiction, literary fiction and most recently, non-fiction. When she’s not writing she can be found spending time with family, going on walks, or watching the latest grammar videos.