Premiering today, Sungaze’s latest single “Feel Better Tomorrow” cuts straight into the reality of living with chronic illness, pulling no punches about the frustration, loss, and slow healing that shape everyday life.
The Cincinnati band blends shimmering alt-indie textures with plainspoken emotional weight—particularly through Ivory Snow’s lyrics, which trace a personal story that started with a freak accident in 2017 and spiraled into years of unanswered medical issues.
The song didn’t come out of a planned writing session. Ivory and Ian Hilvert, Sungaze’s lead guitarist and co-writer, were walking their neighborhood when the conversation turned toward promotion and the relentless balancing act between survival and self-expression. “On this particular day, I realized just how angry I was about the hand I had been dealt,” Ivory said. “I spent the majority of my 20s in various states of ‘unwellness’… months spent bedridden and countless ER trips, to large swaths of time where on the outside everything looked normal but inside I was a dissociated, anxiety-ridden mess.”
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She never said it out loud, but the weight of those years was pushing her toward something. The next day, stuck at home sick with a head cold, she got an email from Ian. Attached was a file titled “Feel Better Tomorrow.” The track, originally a guitar riff he’d been playing around the apartment, became the foundation for what Ivory immediately recognized as the song. “We ended up restructuring it a couple times… there were times where I think we both wanted to give up… but we pushed through and trusted the process. It didn’t turn out the way we initially planned, but it came out the way I think it was meant to be.”
The lyrics touch directly on the isolation of invisible illness and the ache of what could have been.
“I know if I had been a ‘normal and healthy’ 20-something, my 20s would have looked a lot more like spending weeks at a time on the road with my best friends… and a lot less like the ERs and doctor’s offices I came to frequent instead.”
To go with the track, the band self-directed a music video and launched a t-shirt collaboration with the alternative clothing brand Ten of Clubs. Both aim to bring visibility to the chronic illness community, still largely underrepresented in music and culture. In the video, Ivory wears a hospital gown while doing mundane errands like grocery shopping—“to illustrate what it can feel like to have an invisible illness,” she explains. “On the outside everything may look ‘normal’ to others, but I am always aware of the ways in which I don’t feel quite right.”
“Feel Better Tomorrow” is the second in a series of singles that Sungaze plans to release throughout 2025. After years of building albums, the band is leaning into single-by-single storytelling—“really building out the world for each song,” Ivory says.
Sungaze started as a solo project by Ian, who moved away from his long-time metal band to explore something softer. Ivory was initially brought in as a temporary keyboardist but never left. “Eventually we began writing collaboratively and I slowly began singing back-up vocals on some songs,” she says.
Their debut album Light in All of It came out in 2019, followed by a second album driven by tracks Ivory wrote on a custom guitar Ian built for her. Their self-titled third album dropped in August 2024.
The band’s live lineup now includes six members: Ian Hilvert (lead guitar, vocals), Ivory Snow (vocals), Angela Colvin (bass, backing vocals), Charlie Hausfeld and Zach Starkie (rhythm guitars), and Justin Van Wagenen (drums). Their sound—rooted in shoegaze, grunge, alt-country, and more—has continued to evolve. “I feel like we’re now making the music I always knew we eventually would, but didn’t know how to get to,” Ivory says.
Sungaze also stays connected to their scene. Ivory mentions acts like Phanta, Touchdown Jesus, Multimagic, Moonbeau, Mid Life Reverie, and Left at Orion, alongside regional favorites like No Culture, Bosses, Seventh Cloud, Glimmer, Necromoon, and Cigarettes for Breakfast.
In the single’s cover art and in every line of the song, there’s a quiet kind of exhaustion, one that doesn’t ask for pity—just space to speak. “Our brains often feel at odds with our physical capabilities,” Ivory says. “It’s an incredibly frustrating place to be.”
