The new Onesie video moves through places where Ben Haberland’s father lived: his dad’s childhood house, the building where he worked, the old family apartment, the park they used to hang out at.
Shot and directed by Brendan McKnight, the clip for “Twilight Years” — premiering today ahead of Onesie’s fourth LP on Sell The Heart Records — takes Haberland back to all of them. Between stops, the band plays. The song is what Haberland wrote after his father died, and it sits at the center of the album.
Listeners who’ve heard the record early have told the band it’s the best song on it. It’s also the most specific one. The lyrics carry around the small debris that grief leaves: “I got your watch and jean jacket,” “Staring at the photo on the fridge,” “Laughing like Salacious Crumb / Living in a glass onion.”
Haberland works out the arithmetic of having one parent left — “Now pick up your parent / At the airport / The one that’s left / Shifting gears in your twilight years” — and name-checks the TV they watched together: Hill Street Blues, Family Feud. The song signs off on a line that reads like a voicemail: “It’s your boy / Talking into the void.”
“Twilight Years” was recorded and mixed by Travis Harrison — Guided By Voices’ perma-engineer and a producer on Built To Spill records — at his Serious Business studio. Haberland did additional recording at Chez Ben. Jack Callahan mastered it.
The album’s first single approached Haberland’s own timeline from a different angle. “Meetcha At Minnies (The Captain’s Song)” is a Thin Lizzy-styled ripper built around real events in the mid 90s at Haberland’s upstate New York alma-mater — a campus hostage situation where the attacker claimed to have a microchip implant, and a student took a bullet to the groin.
“At the time this deeply disturbing hostage situation seemed so random,” Haberland says. “It became something people on campus joked about, which is pretty heartless and would be ridiculous in today’s context. The details always sort of bounced around in my subconscious and they spilled forth in a bit of narrative in this rather poppy song. The lyrics also gesture towards how one tries to reconcile their changing world view over their own timeline.”
That line about reconciling a worldview over one’s own timeline connects both singles — a forgotten campus incident on one, a parent’s absence on the other, both inside pop structures.
On “Meetcha At Minnies” that structure includes a glam rock bridge that hands the mic to Greg Vegas (Declared Goods) on sax. The animated video, directed by Brooklyn filmmaker Jen Meller, follows a cat on a skateboard through environments that keep shifting between familiar and otherwise.
The cat itself was scanned from Haberland’s grade school report card and redrawn by Meller. “The goal was to have fun with it,” Haberland says. “Musically there is a positive, chugging, yearning spirit there and once I compiled the album cover art I hoped this character could make an appearance in a video. That said, if you follow closely you’ll see plenty of overlap between The Cat and The Captain.”
The fourth Onesie album is due June 19, 2026 on Berkeley’s Sell The Heart Records.
It follows a trilogy that ran between jangling Brit-invasion psych pop on one end and 90s guitar destruction on the other. The record itself is billed as “a dense, blissed out, pissed off, technicolor manifesto… as if slacker power pop itself had 35 minutes to get its affairs in order before the electric chair.”
Onesie have been at it eight years. Haberland writes and sings and plays guitar. Rob Lanterman (Shrugdealer, Hidden Home Records) plays the other guitar. Jason Bauers (Lie About, Better Plastic, Sharkswimmer, Behold…The Arctopus) drums. Ernie D’Amaso (Automat0m, Ernest Ernie & The Sincerities) plays bass.
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