Song Premiere: Generationals, 'Black Lemon'

As the end of summer nears, here's one more bouncy tune to carry you into fall. "Black Lemon," by Generationals, two former high school buddies Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer, mixes marimba-based jolliness and lyrics tinged with darkness. It looks at life's ties that bind and searches for ways to chill and not fight every battle.

Generationals have made three albums together. For their fourth, Alix, they added a new dimension: the musical magician better known as producer Richard Swift. He is one of those people who manage to help other artists fulfill their musical vision; Foxygen, The Shins and Mynabirds immediately come to mind. Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer took their nearly finished album to Swift, thinking he'd scrap the whole thing. He didn't. "I looked at the demos objectively and really just helped organize the sounds into something that was sonically cohesive," Swift says about Alix. "I knew they spent a lot of time on their own, on their headphones creating these beats and bells and whistles and felt no need to drastically change them."

Alix comes out Sept. 16.