Dari Bay Returns with “Chevy,” a Study in Control and Collapse

Zack James has spent the past year mapping the quiet erosion of certainty. Two singles from his Dari Bay project, last year’s “The Joke” and last month’s “We’re Gonna Be Okay,” landed with an unassuming precision that made them stand out immediately. Now a third track, “Chevy,” arrives as another sharp turn in the lead-up to his album Surprise Wish, due June 26 through Double Double Whammy.

“Chevy” is fuzzed-out and fluttery, built around a staccato rhythm that feels simultaneously groovy and disorienting. The song’s momentum works against itself, each note pushing forward while the lyrics document a steady retreat. James puts it directly: “It’s me trying and failing to dominate my surroundings. I’m getting rid of the things in my life that are out of my control, which just isolates me and makes my world smaller and smaller. By the end of the song I am trapped in a box with no door and no windows.” The music video, which James self-directed with additional filming by his Robber Robber bandmate Nina Cates, follows that compression until the final moments, when light breaks in and the frame opens.

There’s no sudden catharsis in the song itself, just the friction between control and its limits. James has shaped these tensions into something immediate without making them sound easy. Surprise Wish continues to take shape as a document of that process.