There’s a line between indie folk and indie pop where things start to shimmer a bit—that’s where Blue Monkey lives now. “Gleaming” is equal parts protest song and personal balm, dressed up in airy pop-rock textures and a voice that feels more like a familiar conversation than a performance. It’s got a friendly bite to it: catchy enough to hum along to without realising you’re digesting something deeper. And by the end, you’re not just listening—you’re seeing the world a little more clearly, and a little more critically.
This isn’t surface-level soul-searching. It’s rooted in something heavier, something closer to grief. “We don’t admire what’s beautiful anymore, we attack it”, Blue Monkey says in the song’s notes, and that cynicism—though softly delivered—is hard to unhear once it lands. Inspired in part by Haruki Murakami’s ideas about the western obsession with individualism, “Gleaming” is a reflection of how much we’ve traded away in the name of self-preservation. And yet, it’s not defeatist. It’s driven by a kind of quiet hope that if we can just see the gleam, we might stop trying to smother it.
Sonically, it’s lean but far from plain. There’s a classic pop sensibility threading through the folkier bones—almost like if early Feist met Big Thief on a day they both felt unusually generous. The voice (still unmistakably Charlee Remitz, but wrapped in something new) carries a gentle grit that keeps the sweetness grounded. It’s catchy without being cloying, thoughtful without demanding anything of you. It simply asks you to look around—and maybe, to care a little more.
About Blue Monkey:
Blue Monkey, the newest incarnation of Charlee Remitz, is more than just a rebrand—it’s a return to self, a shedding of genre and expectation. With roots in pop but a heart now beating steadily in the folk world, they’ve managed to make complexity feel welcoming. “Pylons“, the eleven-minute debut, was about transcendence. “Gleaming” is about the mess we find ourselves in before we get there. And there’s something deeply comforting about that honesty.
Follow Blue Monkey: