Trance Effect is a band from Dimapur. They specialize in agreeable and clean rock songs; the ones which you can just put on and listen to without too much effort, which will consequently leave you to concentrate on avoiding crashing into other vehicles on your daily commute. Their new single is exactly in this vein. Honestly, you could even be forgiven for not paying it much heed after a few listens, but it’s pleasant and catchy, so it’s pretty much guaranteed to be in your regular rotation. This is a song that will come to your rescue when you can’t make up your mind about what you want to listen to. In those moments, throw ‘Blue Sweatshirt’ on (no pun intended).

Getting into the nitty-gritty of the song itself is a bit of a futile exercise. It’s a jumpy, groovy little love song with all the classic ingredients of a sort of 2010s radio tune. Warm and clean guitars (of course), a straight-ahead groove (of course), some mix embellishments (of course) and a catchy hook (this bit is getting annoying, isn’t it?); it’s very by-the-numbers, but those very numbers have shaped Western music culture for decades now, so it’s fair enough. The most obvious thing about the song is its simplicity, so doing things like commenting on how much reverb the second guitar has or why the bass tone is so punchy and articulated might not be in the right spirit (it’s because artists like Tame Impala and Air basically brought the classic Hofner sound back and everyone’s been using it since then, if you’re the kind of person that cares about these things). ‘Blue Sweatshirt’ is just a bit of fun, Trance Effect clearly sound like they had a blast writing and performing it, and we should treat it as such. No more, no less!