PREMIERE: Seabear — Cut My Hair

As we close out this dreary blustery January, Reykjavík’s stalwart twee darlings Seabear have come to the rescue with a brand new single. We are honoured to bring you the first listen of their bright and innocently romantic pop-bop “Cut My Hair”!

Their first single in a year, “Cut My Hair” officially hits the world on February 2 on the anniversary of their previous release “Don’t Be Sad”. Their last release was a stormy melancholic heartwrencher that perfectly matches our current weather, their new offering is the kind of warm and shiny tune that makes us wish we didn’t have four more months of winter ahead.

We caught up with Seabear’s frontman and core member Sindri Már Sigfússon about the playful song that’s already wormed its way into our brains, and how it was a true boss move.

“It’s very upbeat for us and it’s definitely the first time there’s a saxophone solo in a Seabear song,” says Sindri. “When we were more of an active band, when we were still touring, we were always talking about that we wanted to try to make more like Bruce Springsteen-esque music, but we just never did.”

Sindri recorded the demo for “Cut My Hair” on his own in 2014 (“It was just the chords and a drum loop,” he says) at the former studio of his friend and collaborator Alex Somers, while the band was on hiatus. Seabear has been touring steadily for many years and went on a break in 2010 that ended up lasting nearly 12 years, until releasing the single “Waterphone” in 2019.

“We all just wanted to make more upbeat songs that are more fun to play live, because we were playing the same slow songs for five weeks in a row and it was like, ‘Jesus let’s just make some sort of Bruce Springsteen music so we can rock out more on stage’, you know,” he says. “But then we ended up going on hiatus after that initial break for various reasons.”

The song came back on the docket for Sindri once the band had taken up together again, taking care of unfinished business.

“I always have songs that I don’t finish, so they kind of stay in somewhere in the filing cabinet of my brain,” he says. “So I just remembered this song that I never made anything out of from 10 years ago. Mainly, I had written the lyrics and the chords. I still have a lot in the filing cabinet, but I need to get them out of there to make new ones.”

The full band — comprised of Guðbjörg Hlín Guðmundsdóttir, Halldór Ragnarsson, Örn Ingi Ágústsson, Kjartan Bragi Bjarnason and Sóley Stefánsdóttir — came together to round out the track by infusing their own unique gifts to the track. To really make the “Cut My Hair” pop off and achieve its original intentions, beloved saxophonist Tumi Árnason was brought in to rip a sick solo.

“It’s pretty unrecognisable from the demo,” Sindri admits. “It’s a similar tempo and I think the arrangement is quite similar. I’m not going to do some metaphor now, but in this band, people just do whatever they want. Like individually, there’s no there’s no one calling the shots on anything. There’s a lot of very different characters in this band. Musically, we’re a very diverse bunch. It’s kind of strange that we ended up in a band together.”

Along with the idealistic and carefree lyrics that recall the pure feeling of a new-friend-crush, the song’s driving guitars and fast tempo give it that Bruce-ian energy that initially inspired the composition. The end result is both fresh and nostalgic, and is leading the charge for the great comeback of the sax solo.

“We used to play some Springsteen cover live, and he was someone that we would listen to you on the bus,” he says. “So that’s kind of fun now. We can make our Bruce Springsteen dreams come true.”