Winter and Hooky Share First Single From Collaborative EP 'Water Season'

Philadelphia-based tastemaker label Julia’s War Recordings have announced Water Season, an EP by Brazilian-American artist Winter and the Philly electro-lo-fi duo Hooky, arriving on February 14, 2025. To preview the first-time collaboration, lead single “horseshoe” is out now.

The single is a wiry guitar-driven track, dripping in Winter’s syrupy vocals, and sprinkled with twinkling drum machines. Its electronic heartbeat passes through the listener like a beloved memory, shimmering with earnest lyrics and a DIY music video to match. Self-directed and filmed last fall in Philadelphia, Samira Winter and Hooky’s Scott Turner and Sam Silbert each took turns filming as they wandered through John Heinz Park and the Museum of Modern Art. The result was a blend of candid exploration —a portrait of their friendship and the emotional crossroads they shared, frozen in time.

“I took the train to Philly and for a couple of days, we just jammed at Scott’s place for hours,” says Winter about making the “horseshoe” music video. “It was this cool feeling of making new friends, exploring a city and also making art together for the first time. It strangely felt like I had known them forever, even though it was the first time we were hanging out.”

Water Season spawned when Winter and Hooky met online as fans of each other’s music and soon started corresponding with ideas, the first of which was “horseshoe." After relocating from Los Angeles to New York, Winter took a trip down to Philadelphia to visit Turner and Silbert in the summer of 2024. A true friendship began and the trio spent the whole day writing songs together. Informed by Winter’s adoration for otherworldly dreamscapes and Hooky’s digital edge within the Philadelphia shoegaze scene, Winter and Hooky quickly realized their sounds fit like a puzzle. They coalesced their love for lo-fi, indie, and electronica to pair beautiful melodies with experimentation, sampling and guitar. What resulted was a sonic snapshot of the intersection of time and feeling; the bittersweet and fleeting sensation of the end of summer fading into fall. 

Water Season sounds like the natural next step from each artist’s last offering. Last year, Winter shared her …and she’s still listening EP, which was infused with trip-hop, spoken word, and electronic music. Hooky dropped their fourth album Mirage via Julia’s War last year; a trippy and triumphant, reverb-drenched record. Both of these releases pushed Winter and Hooky out of their comfort zones, toward each other to make something that was meant to be.

ABOUT WINTER:

Since the early 2010s, Brazilian-American artist Samira Winter has been cultivating a cult following for her singular take on ethereal shoegaze. She spent her formative years growing up in Curitiba, Brazil, where her mother filled their home with the gentle melodies of MPB (música popular brasileira), and her father introduced her to the distorted sounds of American punk. After moving to Boston for college, she eventually relocated to Los Angeles, where she carved a distinct lane for herself in the city’s thriving underground. Initially pulling influence from classic dream pop and 90’s indie, Winter’s sound quickly coalesced into something uniquely her own, developing a brand of make-believe, fairy tale surrealism that sets her apart from her contemporaries. 

ABOUT HOOKY:

Hooky is a duo from Philadelphia that makes electronic music. The project consists of Scott Turner and Sam Silbert. It is heavily inspired by dance music and the band Ween.

Photo credit: Samira Winter

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