Roswell, New Mexico may be the birthplace of Demi Moore and the home to a sizable cheese factory, but it’s still best known for exactly one thing: a 1947 UFO incident that continues to occupy a large space in our cultural mythology. The event also continues to occupy a large space in the town itself — cruise the main drag of this dusty, windswept desert city and you’ll find neon sign after neon sign advertising now-dingy tourist attractions relating to the crash. It has a forlorn air, this poor little scribble of a town in the middle of an expansive desert under even more expansive skies.
And so it makes perfect sense that Moon King, the musical project of longtime friends and Toronto natives Daniel Woodhead and Maddie Wilde, might give this song the same name as that New Mexico city. With a minute-plus intro that rambles towards the lyrics as U.S. Route 285 approaches the town itself, this track inhabits a massive, spiraling musical space, one that’s studded by the sonic equivalent of those neon signs. The fact that Woodhead and Wilde’s voices give the track a distinctively B-52’s-esque quality doesn’t hurt the outer-space vibe either. Of course, those same voices also impart Roswell’s forlornness to the song. Compared to the track’s spacious instrumentation, they sound almost as tiny as the town looks against its even-more-spacious backdrop of land and sky.