Photo by Omari Spears 

With a name that calls on characters from Malcolm in the Middle and songs like Bubble Boy [after the 2001 Jake Gyllenhaal film] Boston’s Dewey operates from a baseline of nostalgia. Their new single “Y2K” is no different. But, while most of Dewey’s dreamy discography highlights school crushes and waiting by lockers, their newest release recalls a less pleasant aspect of growing up in the 2000’s.

You’d have to be under a rock not to notice the flood of media about the apocalypse. With our current political landscape and rampant climate change, it’s not hard to see why doomsday anxieties are on the rise. But we’ve been here before. In 2012, masses of people believed that the end of the Mayan calendar was a prediction of armageddon. Radio preacher Harold Camping predicted a 2011 judgement day based on biblical numerology. Or most notably, the beginning of the year 2000, a few years after front woman Annie Melden was born, when it was believed that computers counting down to zero would bring on the end times. Driven by pressing anxieties around the state of the world, Melden dove into learning about the doomsday preparations that colored the new millenium: “I listened to a bunch of radio interviews with Terrence McKenna about his off-grid preparations for the year 2000, when he thought the computer and/or electrical grids would possibly go down. Other more strictly religious people thought Jesus would come back and save the good people-get rid of the bad.”

 But Dewey’s “Y2K” is half-apocalypse-checklist half-love-song, and a gentle reminder of things we might take for granted when we’re too plugged in. “Y2K” functions like a post-it note on the fridge to call your Grandma. A reminder of the small ways we tell people we love them in the internet age, (“Why don’t we text our fathers interesting animal facts.”) With catastrophes taking place seemingly everyday we become tapped into a news cycle that really does seem like the end of the world sometimes. Dewey recommends taking some time to turn the radio off every once in a while.

Stream “Y2K” by Dewey off Greenline Records below.