There’s something almost perverse about naming a song after seasonal misery, and to their credit, Ruby & Sasha commit to that discomfort rather than softening it into something more palatable. What strikes me most isn’t the topic; allergies as alienation are a clever enough conceit, but how stubbornly the track resists resolution. Whether that’s a strength or a weakness depends entirely on what you want from a three-and-a-half-minute song.
The vocal performance here deserves more attention than it typically might get in conversations about this track. There’s a congested, almost muffled quality to certain phrases that sound deliberate, as though the delivery itself is sneezing through the verses. It’s a small touch, easy to miss, but it reveals a level of craft that goes beyond just clever wordplay. This subtlety gets buried under an arrangement that eventually demands your full attention and then some
This is a slow-burn recording, and slow-burns live or die on whether the payoff justifies the wait. Here, I’d argue it pays off, but how much is yet to be seen. The instrumental climax arrives with real force; guitars cutting through what had been a fairly hushed, almost muted soundscape. It’s enormously satisfying in the moment. In fact, the song could go on twice in length concerning the second half, which picks up immensely as it goes onto the end, and you feel you could use a little more of such a good thing it turns out to be.
Where the duo really succeed is in refusing to make the title too neat. Hay fever itself isn’t sadness, exactly, its irritation, discomfort, a kind of low-grade suffering that doesn’t rise to the level of tragedy but still colors everything around it. That’s a genuinely unusual emotional register for a song to occupy, and I respect that they didn’t turn it into a straightforward breakup anthem. The lyrics stay just vague enough that you can’t pin down whether this is about a relationship, a season of life, or something more diffuse, and I think that ambiguity is most likely intentional.
Placed next to their first release, this track functions almost like a rebuttal, where that song found something communal and unguarded in nature; this places isolation and discomfort in the same setting. That tension between the two songs is more interesting to me than either track alone. It suggests a duo willing to discuss with themselves across a track list, which is a more compelling artistic move than most bands attempt.
Still, I keep coming back to the sense that “Hay Fever” is a very good song rather than an unfinished article. The ideas are sharp, the performances are committed, and the guitar work in that final stretch is genuinely thrilling. But the front half asks for a lot of patience, demanding listener will feel rewarded for extending it. This is a song that rewards close, repeated listening far more than casual first impressions, which makes it a grower, depending on how much time you’re willing to give it.
Claire Uebelacker