B-Side Guys

Some spaces exist outside normal reality. In Super Tuesday’s latest single, Alex Kisch explores perhaps the most peculiar of these—the darkened cabin of a night flight, where strangers share intimate proximity while remaining completely isolated within their own consciousness.

“Soaking up the Silence,” the first release from Super Tuesday’s upcoming fourth album “Through The Static” (due June 20, 2025), transforms this mundane travel experience into something approaching existential meditation. The track’s sparse arrangement—likely incorporating the jangle-pop elements that have become Kisch’s signature—creates sonic space that mirrors the cabin’s hushed atmosphere, where even whispers feel intrusive.

What distinguishes this offering is how it finds profundity in banality. Kisch builds the narrative through minimalist observations: an exit row seat, moderate temperature, lost sense of time. These details create immediate spatial recognition before expanding into the song’s central insight—that each sleeping stranger carries “a story” and “a dream,” creating a temporary community of unconscious travelers moving through darkness together.

The repeated image of “soaking up the silence” suggests both passive reception and active absorption—the protagonist simultaneously experiencing solitude while collecting the accumulated quiet of dozens of strangers. This duality creates the track’s emotional core, transforming isolation into unlikely connection.

Most effective is how Kisch captures air travel’s peculiar suspension of normal social conventions. The observation that there are “no hellos” and “no goodbyes” illuminates how these transitory spaces create different rules of engagement, where proximity doesn’t necessitate interaction. The closing reference to “my mystery friends” delivers the perfect paradoxical punchline—intimate strangers who never acknowledge each other yet share a vulnerable collective experience.

For Kisch, who gained recognition in the ’90s with Boston alt-rockers Dirt Merchants before finding renewed creative purpose during the pandemic lockdowns, this exploration of isolating yet communal experience feels particularly resonant. Having returned to music during a period when physical connection was severely limited, his perspective on these liminal spaces carries additional weight.

As preview of an album promising to explore “personal failings, love, loss and the surreal nature of the everyday,” “Soaking up the Silence” suggests Super Tuesday remains committed to finding universal connection points in seemingly minor moments—a continuation of the sensibility that drew comparisons to Big Star, The Replacements, and Elliott Smith on previous releases.