We're stoked to team up legendary Los Angeles' musician Darren Rademaker of The Tyde to celebrate the release of the fifth Tyde album, Season 5. We caught up with him at his friends' home studio in the Hollywood Hills to record a special version of one of his new tracks and discuss the origins of the band, relocating to Florida and why his heart will always be in California.

The TSPTR x The Tyde capsule collection is available now exclusively in the webstore.

In Season 5, the long-awaited fifth full-length by beach-pop project The Tyde, frontman Darren Rademaker unveils his vision of an ‘80s-inspired Suave Nouveau, with a clutch of sweet, melancholic love songs inspired by his relocation to Florida, evoking lush Everglades, mellow macho, the ghost of Jimmy Buffett, white sand beaches, flamingos swooping across a cerulean sky, speedboats cutting through the bay and pastel linen suits billowing in the breeze as the sun dips beneath the horizon.

Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León “discovered” Florida in 1513, naming the peninsula La Florida, the flowering land. In Season 5, Rademaker reflects on his own return to the flowering land, and the artistic diaspora that caused him to quit California in 2020 in search of a New World of his own. “I lived in Florida from the ages of 10 to 25, but never really got to explore it,” he says. “When I came back, I decided to really embrace the whole Florida aesthetic. I moved into an art deco home in Sarasota with pink seashell lamps. I visited Key West, like seven times. I also quit smoking weed and cigarettes, and stopped saying shit like “LOL" and “amazeballs.” It felt different. It felt good.”

He started developing the tracks on “Season Five” during lockdown—just him, a Casio keyboard and re-runs of Miami Vice and Magnum P.I. “In the past, I have always looked to California for inspiration, with surfing and the Neil Young coastal vibe. But I knew I wanted these songs to be less California, and more about the islands.” The result is a sonic diary, high on the fumes of memory, filled with longing for things that are vanishing amid a quietly collapsing America, juxtaposing the allure of peachy sunsets with a sense of negative space, a psychic and temporal dislocation, the feeling that a golden age has slipped away, and the vagabond years are over.

The record features the talents of many good friends, including Dan Horne, Colby Buddelmeyer, Matt Correia (Allah-Las), Clay Finch (Mapache), Albert Hickman, Derek James (The Entrance Band), Alex Knost (Tomorrow’s Tulips) and Adam MacDougall (Circles Around the Sun/Black Crowes), with artist/ musician Matt Fishbeck (Holy Shit) designing the deco-inspired album artwork.

And as much as they are inspired by the past, these songs are keenly aware of an uncertain future—because there is no such thing as a time machine, and there is no going back. Ultimately, “Season 5” asks the question—where do we go after the sun sets on our dreams? Where the fuck is the New New World? In Rademaker's eyes, it no longer exists in any specific American geography—rather, all hope remains in the timeless, unending power of music, and its power to take us to the places we wish we could be. Even if they don’t exist anymore.

https://thetyde.bandcamp.com/album/season-5