I remember watching Groundhog Day as a child in Texas and missing the entire point of the movie, because all I could think about was how cold everyone looked. Even back then, with no concept of how movies were made, I understood that a lot of people were having a tough day at their jobs.

I no longer have that experience, having been mostly remote for the better part of 5 years (wow). But as a parent, the claustrophobia of winter is very real and seemingly endless.

We gave birth to a boy in January who is, undeniably, a summer baby. When I told Jack next week would be warmer, his first question was, “Can I finally wear shorts?” In that same moment, as if to answer his own question, he handed me a jar of slime that had frozen in the car overnight. So as parents are forced to do daily (and never pre-warned about), I had to break his heart and let him know that shorts weather was still a ways off.

While today’s song isn’t exactly a summer anthem, it is a stepping stone towards longer days and, yes, a nice breezy pair of shorts. Let’s rock.

Grayscale - “Dance With Your Ghost” (2025)

For the majority of my music listening years, I’ve been a pop-punk guy. From the time I was 18ish to nearly 30ish, I came home from work or not talking to women at bars and wrote music reviews for free. Even then I knew that perhaps I had pigeonholed myself into a genre that is known for being annoyingly consistent.

(I’m just now realizing the Groundhog Day analogy works here too.)

Most pop-punk music is about the singer being wronged - by work, by life, by women (usually women), by parents, by society. It’s something I could barely relate to 15 years ago and certainly don’t understand now. But there has always been something about crunchy guitars, a walking bass-line and a singer that sounds both 12 and 32 at the same time.

All of this can be said for Grayscale, a band that has been sort of on my radar since their debut in 2016. Much like yours truly, they’ve been making some micro and macro adjustments during the last ten years, and now they’ve released what is probably the best version of their shtick. The Hart is 12 songs with titles like “Kept Me Alive,” “Talking In My Sleep,” and “Mum II” that are emotional, yes OF COURSE, but also just a smidge more world-weary.

“Dance With Your Ghost” is the best example of this. Not only does it sound exactly like the similarly-named (and excellent) Valencia song “Dancing With a Ghost,” it’s a story about someone disappearing but never being gone. It’s the type of music you can scream or whisper, a tune so vague it lets us fill in the blanks how we see fit.

Typically when a band “grows up” it means in one of two things: they get more experimental or more boring. Grayscale have avoided both, not leaving their more raucous music in the past but also giving us just a bit more to chew on. Think about it this way: how different are you really from the version of you that existed 10 years ago? It’s easy to point to Capital B BIG changes, but the vast majority are incremental and only noticeable to us.

The bands who understand this are the ones who last. We don’t outgrow them, but that doesn’t mean we’re not growing. The best music moves with us, making us sing along, sure, but also helps us see we don’t need to be in a rush to get anywhere, either.

Is it a JackJam?

Mostly. I don’t think this is Jack’s favorite song of all time, mainly because rock music is just hard. I think if Jack was familiar with mid 2000s The Killers, he’d appreciate “Dance With Your Ghost” more, but I’m not quite ready to unpack my complicated relationship with Brandon Flowers just yet. For now, the song has made the playlist, but we will have to keep a close eye as to Jack’s Skip Rate (how often he will tolerate a song before just yelling that he doesn’t like it anymore).

If anything changes, you’ll be the first to know. And just like Groundhog Day, we’ll do this all again next week.

BLAKE