Prairie rock: Keep for Cheap drops new single Cyberspace

Shoegaze is arguably the best-named musical genre of the post-rock era. Its name comes from dingy music venues where long-haired punk-slash-rockers played strange, atmospheric chords on electric guitars, staring stubbornly down at their strings without looking up. They seemed to be gazing unflinchingly at their own shoes while the music just reverberated in the space around them. Whether mediums or musicians, they earned the genre its name.

Of course, music keeps changing, and if someone told you that old-west country music got a hold of shoegaze, you might imagine a cowboy in a wheat field staring solemnly down at his banjo. However, Keep for Cheap is far from dour. They’re a brightly coloured band that’s looking way up from their guitars, bass, and drums, with a brightness in their atmospheric pondering that you can’t exactly call bootgaze. This country-inspired post-folk atmospheric rock sound is hard to pin down, but they call it prairie rock, and that works.

Spacing out on prairie punk: The new single is called Cyberspace

The ‘atmospheric’ descriptor hits this kind of music because it seems to open up and fill a larger space than the venue allows, making a tiny bar echo like a great empty canyon. Prairies do this, too, with a sunny, golden kind of foreboding that invites you on freedom-inspired road trips with the same voice as claustrophobic corn mazes. Sounds weird, but their listeners are into that.

Keep for Cheap says their new single, Cyberspace, is “reminiscent of Wednesday and Bully, or Pinegrove meets Soccer Mommy”. They probably wouldn’t agree that it sounds like Lowercase Noises’ “Prepare to Die, But Sow the Rye,” finally got therapy, or someone told “On A Green,” by Sadness to calm down and kick its emo phase, but now someone’s said that, too. All this music shares an echoey, distant power, but what makes Cyberspace special is how it seems to draw closer and notice you. Shoegaze-adjacent music doesn’t usually do that; it’s too busy looking down.

Cyberspace is a song that builds on country guitar strumming with a beat that sounds like it should be in a cheerful country song, but a distant electronic wail keeps it solemn as it moves between moments of wakeful contemplation and sullen sleepiness. The lyrics discuss how people get stuck online and the harmful behaviours that come with that, striking on themes of consumption and the commodification of the self.

It’s bouncy. You could dance to it. The irony would suit the song, which is an anchoring single on the band’s sophomore album, Big Grass. The album’s producer, Abe Anderson, says: “It’s one of our more in-depth arrangements on Big Grass, capable of holding multiple meanings and resonating on various levels.”

A two-piece love story inspires a five-piece ban

The foremost members of the band, Kate Malanaphy and Autumn Vagle, often pull on their own love story – be it the romance, the troubles, the angst, or whatever other human emotion you want to shove into this sentence – to inspire their music. Their goal is to make “music that moves, with driving instrumentals and poignant lyrics,” that touch notes of connection between the self, one’s fellow human, the natural world, and – as of Cyberspace bringing the internet into it – the unnatural world.

There’s a lot to be said for Keep for Cheap and the unique, lively country-punk-atmospheric-post-rock-folkgaze prairie rock they create, but at this point you’d best go listen to it. Their new album, Big Grass, releases in August 2024.

The editorial unit