Hataałii Shares 'Brown Fool Eyes' Ahead of Upcoming Album

Hataałii (pronounced: hah - toth - lee) — the 21 year old artist born Hataałiinez Wheeler in Phoenix, AZ and raised in Window Rock, AZ, the capital of Navajo Nation — will release Waiting For A Sign, his new album, on September 13 on Dangerbird Records, with "Brown Fool Eyes." It’s enthralling: part Courtney Barnett, part King Of The Hill, part David Berman — with added forays into the gothic pop of Echo & The Bunnymen. 

"Brown Fool Eyes" is a self-deprecating and hypnotic track that shares DNA with Bowie at his most arch or Paul Westerberg in crooner mode, with a video that casts Hataałii against a gorgeous desert backdrop.

A heady collection of ghost town anthems, short story mirages, and brain fog-clearing personal reckonings, at times Waiting For A Sign recalls the playfully languid puzzlement of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, the trickster melancholy of Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask, or the softer Spacemen 3 songs that cast awe and mystery against a droning, endless atmosphere.

Throughout, Hataałii operates with purpose: the obscurantist details in his lyrics come into focus, giving way to trenchant observations about paranoia (“Alex Jones”), accountability (“Brown Fool Eyes”), and post-colonial fallout (the urgent “Something’s In The Air” and the sanguine comedown “Burn”).

Waiting For A Sign is Hataałii’s second album for Dangerbird following 2023’s Singing Into Darkness and, counting an array of self-released projects, his sixth album since 2019. He’s got fans at Aquarium Drunkard (who called him “a master at conjuring a kind of Southwestern saudade”) and was shouted out by Mac DeMarco on The Adam Friedland Show.

Singing Into Darkness won plaudits from SPIN (who called him “2023’s breakout star”), FLOOD (“Hataałii is utterly charming, disarmingly approachable, and delightful in his playfulness”), and KCRW, and was named one of Aquarium Drunkard’s favorite albums of the year. Alongside his music, Hataałii has also published a poetry chapbook, spinning his words out onto pages rather than in song. 

With Waiting For A Sign, Hataałii’s careful, artful, perhaps unconscious topicality — his ability to write songs that don’t proselytize or scold but prioritize depth and uncanny particularities and the desire to know the unknowable — marks him as a genuinely thrilling songwriter, someone whose prolific and imaginative output demands close appreciation.

Hataałii is also playing with Osees this October at Shiprock Chapter House in New Mexico, see all the details here, with more shows to be announced in the near future.

Waiting For A Sign Tracklist

Alex Jones
Brown Fool Eyes
Love Is Over
Ballad of Athabaskan Theory
Burn
In My Lawn
Go Ahead and Try
Near the Sea
Buckskin Boy
Something's In the Air
Minds Didn't Show Alike
She Held My Arm

Photo Credit: Ryan Del Rosario

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