The sixth studio album from Oakland-based duo Tune-Yards, Better Dreaming (out now via 4AD) serves as both a battlecry for focus in a chaotic world and a bold statement of creative freedom.
When asked what “better dreaming” means to her, vocalist Merrill Garbus points to the influence of Black feminist thinkers Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Autumn Brown, who’ve posited extensively about the necessity of imagining and writing our future, specifically with a Black feminist gaze.
The future she imagines in Better Dreaming breaks free from what is and enters the realm of what could be. It’s a future where she, as a white, upper-middle-class cis woman, is not the only character. It’s a story where everyone will be considered.
Over the past two decades, the group’s signature sound, a kaleidoscopic blend of lo-fi DIY charm and avant-pop sophistication, has deepened and evolved without ever losing its fierce independence. You can hear as much on their new release, which arrives during a whirlwind period of creativity that also includes working on the score of Boots Riley’s upcoming film I Love Boosters. Merrill Garbus (vocals) and Nate Brenner (bass) will also be treating local fans to a special hometown show at Berkeley’s UC Theatre on June 13.
It’s an impactful moment for the band that calls the Bay Area home.
“I’m putting a bunch of pressure on myself,” says Garbus. “That’s probably not useful, but simply because we’re playing for our friends, for our East Bay family. We’re discerning folks out here about what we’re willing to see and what we expect from art.”
Tune-Yards makes a point of supporting their local fans, venues, and promoters, but for this U.S. tour, they’re going the extra yard to aid a critical local nonprofit. The duo has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket sold will support Street Spirit, an independent newspaper devoted to covering houselessness and poverty, with reporting by those most impacted. Sold on the streets of Berkeley and Oakland by unhoused people, Street Spirit allows vendors to keep 100 percent of the donations they receive.
As a creative, Street Spirit’s model—writers and artists telling and selling their own stories and art to support themselves—strikes Garbus deeply. And while the vocalist has a lot of causes around the world that are near and dear to her heart, she feels the power of centering her advocacy efforts close to home.
“It’s a struggle for me,” she says. “It takes a kind of surrender and humility to say, ‘If we’re spread too thin, we can’t make an impact,’ versus if we devote our efforts to one specific thing: the people struggling in the Bay. Then these ticket add-ons really add up as we go on tour throughout the year.’”
And that seems important, particularly at the moment. Garbus recognizes just how much the region has changed since moving to the Bay Area in the 2000s. Her reflections reveal a complex sense of home in a city transformed.
“I was talking to a friend about looking out at the skyline now and being like, ‘Wow, it just feels different than it used to,’” she says. “Like the Salesforce Tower, where you’re like, ‘We are in the home of the fascist overlords now.’”
Fascism informs much of the record’s urgent tone and introspective themes.
Garbus describes Better Dreaming as “a battle for focus in a world of distraction.” She says her own defensive campaign in the field involves setting deliberate boundaries with technology and news consumption.
“I’ve doctored my devices,” she says. “I can’t swipe left on my phone to get any news. I set a lot of timers, and I pause Instagram. I use tech’s own tools to make sure that I am choosing when I intake news.” She credits Brenner, her partner in Tune-Yards and life, for filling her in on the essentials when she does feel like burying her head in the sand.
Such intentionality is crucial in creating an album like Better Dreams. One of the LP’s working titles, A Fight Against Fascism with Trash Music, captures its defiant spirit.
“I could not have imagined that we would be in fascism in such a tangible way, so quickly,” she says of that discarded moniker for the album. “In early 2023, when I wrote that phrase in my journal, I was thinking, especially since we had a kid and a dog, about what Tune-Yards are, in an age when I don’t want to burn as much fossil fuel as we do when touring around the world.”
For Garbus, “trash music” is a celebration of the DIY, scrappy roots of Tune-Yards—the humanness and imperfection in that initial sound. Given that it’s what other people would put reverb on or clean up or Auto-Tune, she finds that leaving it in feels like a radical stance.
She calls sanitizing music a kind of “eugenics,” a “fascist” attempt to make everyone look, sound, and feel the same. Embracing distortion and abrasiveness is a political and aesthetic choice.
The stance is hardly surprising, coming from a band whose name sounds like a mashup between a musical space and a junkyard—a place where discarded things get new life—just like the scrappy, bold music Garbus and Brenner have been making together since 2006.
Reflecting on the band’s evolution, Garbus notes that she and Brenner have refined their craft over nearly two decades.
“I don’t like to toot my own horn, but I’ve been doing music composition and production for about 20 years,” she says. “We’re better at it. We’re tighter. Nate and I can read each other so much more.”
Unlike their early albums Bird-Brains or Whokill, Better Dreaming reflects the pair’s seasoned musicianship and sharper creative vision. It’s not just an album; it’s a testament to artistic growth.
While their latest LP wrestles with heavy themes, it also bursts with joy and movement. There’s that misattributed Emma Goldman quote, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” (allegedly uttered after Goldman was chastised by a member of the Anarchist Party for moving joyfully at a grief-fueled gathering. While the quote is doctored, it is a snappy summation of a longer statement the anarcho-feminist icon made that night.) Garbus connects this to her own lifelong struggle with body image and societal expectations.
“I’ve been told in every language, spoken and unspoken, that my body is not right, that it needs to look a certain way, that it needs to be smaller, tighter, clenched,” she says. “I’ve been told that so much, that it is my first mode of liberation, to move the way that my body feels like moving.”
She admits that’s not easy amid grief and exhaustion from witnessing so many devastating world events. “I often don’t want to dance these days,” she says. “I feel like there’s so much grief in me that sobs will come up. I’d rather lie down all day, just be in a ball huddled underneath a table.”
Yet, the album’s title suggests hope and forward-looking imagination. That’s why she was led to incorporate the lyric “we all get free,” reminiscent of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “No one is free until we are all free,” into the album track “Limelight.” She wants to believe it’s true. She wants the kids—her young son, who is heard on the same track, and others around the world—to be alright.
Better dreams abound. Garbus has hope in the future: “It’s going to be something really beyond my imagination.”
TUNE-YARDS Fri/13. The UC Theatre, Berkeley. Tickets and more info here.
