Imagine yourself in bed on Christmas Eve, you are not really awake anymore, but also not asleep yet. Music is entering your subconscious mind. You feel like floating into a completely new world, a fairytale world of lucid dreams. The music sounds familiar but at the same time very different from what you are used to hear around this time of the year. It is as if you have been transposed to an alternate world, where everything is blurred and reality and dreams are inseparable. That otherworldly music is joined by an ethereal voice, singing about Christmas being here. And then you wake up, see a show white 7” spinning on your record player and you realize you have been listening to the new Shacks’ Christmas single, that Santa has just put there without you noticing it.

The Shacks are the duo of singer/bassist Shannon Wise and guitarist producer Max Shrager. In 2016, The Shacks were featured on the track ‘Strange Boy’ by fellow New Yorkers El Michels Affair, which was quickly followed by an EP on Big Crown Records (produced by El Michels Affair’s Leon Michels and Max), and some 45s, of which their cover of Ray Davies’ ‘This Strange Effect’ received a lot of praise, as did their 2018 debut album for Big Crown Records, ‘Haze’. More singles followed, most recently a split 7” with label mates Brainstory.

Apart from the original ‘Got To Be Christmas‘, co-written by Brainstory, the single The Shacks recorded for the ninth edition of the Snowflakes Christmas Singles Club also features a cover of one of the most popular Christmas songs ever, Vince Guaraldi’s ‘Christmas Time Is Here’. Both the original and recent cover versions of that classic (like that of Khruangbin, with whom The Shacks have also toured) already sounded dreamy, but The Shacks take the song into a completely different dimension. The record comes on snow white vinyl and is limited to 300 copies.