Attention Bird Utopia – the collaborative project of guitarist / songwriter Harrison Whitford (Phoebe Bridgers, Matt Berninger, Conor Oberst) and producer / songwriter Eli Hirsch (Suki Waterhouse, Cautious Clay, Say Lou Lou) – today share ‘Cary’, another cut from their forthcoming debut album Best of Kings, out June 6 via their own label here, here recordings. LISTEN ON SPOTIFY + APPLE MUSIC + AMAZON MUSIC + YOUTUBE MUSIC + PRE-SAVE LP HERE.

Swimming through layers of yearning guitar lines and interpersonal musings, ‘Cary’ mulls over the passing of time. Speaking to that person from a long time ago that had a big impact but with whom you’ve lost touch, the track is an ode to suburbia and that unmoored feeling of change and relocation. However instead of being stuck in that feeling forever, it accepts that those connections and emotions don’t fade but instead, grow with comfort.

Harrison says that “Cary is an ode to suburbia, the malaise of summers and winters past without much purpose, of love built up and burned to the ground. It’s about the memories that breeze in and out of your mind every so often that almost seem like film stills from another person’s life, featuring whoever you used to be and whoever you used to know. It’s about imagining what might have happened to so and so; did they ever fix that crack in their windshield? Did their grandfather die? Did they ever move out of that sleepy little town? How many cats do they have now? Are they still chasing a dream? It’s a small fiction for the lost times of a life you can never return to.”

Written and recorded in a day, Eli expands on the production side of the release to reveal, “Harry had the verses and we wrote the chorus together. We recorded it quickly. Harry came in with the verse to the song. It was one of the earlier things we worked on. We wrote the chorus together in my living room and recorded it that day. I think we both knew it was one of our favorite things we’d ever made. Harry did a full take of just him playing guitar and singing. Then I started recording drums, separately – adding different parts. We did all of it through my tascam cassette machine. It was one of those ones that just came together so quickly.”

Attention Bird Utopia’s genesis begins when Eli was executive producing Suki Waterhouse’s 2024 LP Memoir of A Sparklemuffin at his studio in Los Angeles and Harry dropped in on an afternoon recording session. The two hit it off, and soon Whitford started coming over to Eli’s home studio to blow off steam while playing chess (Eli humbly admits, with a hint of awe, that Harry is the superior chess player: “I’ll never beat him”). They bonded over their love of The Beatles, Jackson Browne, and Paul Simon, and Harry exposed Eli to the deeper cuts from the songbooks of country legends like Hank Williams and Willie Nelson.

‘Cary’ marks the next taste of new music from the duo since their previous lead single ‘Infinity Inside a Shopping Cart’, which exemplifies both the project’s unassuming charm and abundant displays of casual songwriting mastery. Throughout the nine songs on Best of Kings, it becomes clear that the Whitford / Hirsch songwriting partnership was a potent one (“It’s a tale as old as time: two Jews writing music together,” Eli jokes, referencing a rich history of such collaborations). Whether it’s surprisingly melancholic celebrity run-ins (‘Beck’s Eyes’), dispatches from imagined lonesome LA cowboys (‘Brother, Oh Brother’), or sweeping travelogue anthems packed with botched plastic surgery and corporatised occultism (‘One Step at a Time’), Attention Bird Utopia prove themselves adroit students of pop songcraft of any stripe.