New Constellations, the ethereal dream-pop creation of Harlee Case and Josh Smith, light up the dark in a way that only the stars can, with soft glimmers of hope and stories shaped by space and time. The duo sat down with IINAG ahead of their debut album, It Comes in Waves, dropping May 15th, 2026, via Nettwerk.
Kendra: You’ve known each other for around 15 years, and once, when asked about your group’s title, you referenced the timelessness of stars. How has time shaped your sound and songwriting?
Harlee: I think that just getting to be a band for so long, and that we’d been working together for four years before putting out a song. We didn’t have any label or any sound that was specifically needed, so it has given us a lot of time to find out what our sound is like within a lot of different sounds and genres. I love that we haven’t released our first album until May, which marks our nine-year anniversary. I feel like getting so much time to play before releasing something has really let us explore every facet of what we were interested in.
Josh: Harlee is such a personal songwriter, and I think she chooses to go for different things. Even just collaborating with each other for these nine years, the stuff we write songs about is different now. How we are as people now, and even if it is the same subject matter, we are coming at it with different perspectives. There will be songs about a specific topic, but we’re coming at it from a different point of view or as a different person experiencing those same things, too. We have a song about a breakup that we wrote eight years ago, and a song we wrote about a breakup now. So we can see our growth as people confronting these feelings, which is kinda cool.
Kendra: You’ve talked about how much of the music on this album is about past relationships. Is there something about dreamy pop music that lends itself to emotional expression for you?
Harlee: I feel that I have a similar writing style, no matter what, if I’m writing on an acoustic guitar or if I’m writing on a fully produced track. I do think that in certain songs, like Waterslides, where Josh made this dreamy track, it was really easy for me to write about being in love.
Josh: Yeah, I feel like there are certain emotions as an artist that you tap into or that you need to process through art with those feelings. Personally, when I’m having a good day, I don’t feel the need to write a song about it because I’m just having a great day. But with some of these tougher emotions, I feel like I need to make a song about this to help process it and express these feelings through it, so I think that is kind of part of it. We lean into certain emotions because those are the ones that we need our art to process and learn what we need to about those feelings. Also, Harlee is just a lover, and we just caught her at a time in her life…
Harlee: I’m going through it!
Kendra: Do you have a song on this album that you’re especially excited for, and why?
Harlee: Absolutely! I think it is the saddest song on the album. It’s called I’m Waiting Now, and I love to write sad sh*t, and I feel like that was the one track where we went there. On the other songs, we try to be optimistic and look at both sides, but on this song, I’m just devastated and being kind of pathetic, and I’m just going to own that. I love it, and I’m excited to sing it live, and I’m excited for other people to hear it.
Josh: John Lennon and Yoko Ono were really into that primal scream theory in the seventies, and I feel like I’m Waiting Now kind of dips into that. It’s like just f*ckin’ scream, and get it out. I’m really excited about that song because I think it is such a departure from some of our other stuff, too.
Kendra: Do you have a favourite memory while creating this album?
Harlee: I’ve had so much fun going to L.A. with Josh. We were in Portland, and we’ve always done it with our crew. It was our first time travelling, and we were staying in Venice. Every day we would work on the album, and walk to the beach, and it was just realizing that we are really making an album now. It felt like this momentous feeling where we travelled for this, spent money on this, and we were just having so much fun. With Tyler down there as well, once we were comfortable, we were just like three silly pals.
Josh: For me, it was the first time we started sequencing the album. We had written these songs over the years, and we weren’t planning an album. When we were recording just one track at a time, it didn’t feel like there was cohesiveness. Then, once we started sequencing the album, a story started to unfold. Being like “oh this song, after this song” or “this is about this,” so if we put it down here, it kind of fits. That was the first time I really saw it as an album and not just individual songs for both of us. It was like a cohesive piece of art and not just songs we happened to write, and that was a big moment for me.
Kendra: Ok, let’s put this out into the universe. Do you have a dream collab?
Harlee: Ok, I don’t know if it is as much of a collaboration as a dream, but my biggest dream is to open up for Dave Matthews at the Gorge. When he is playing, I want him to call me up, and we are singing one of his songs, and Josh is shredding on the guitar, and my life is made.
Josh: I’m a huge Gorillaz fan, and like their whole thing is collaborations, and they move wildly through genres because of that. I can’t necessarily think of individual artists, but I like to think about collaborating outside of our genre and mixing things in. Something like an opera singer, or if we did a country song, I would like to do something like that. And vice versa. It would be like “holy sh*t, Shania Twain is on a New Constellations track.” It would be cool for us to bring people into our world who aren’t necessarily in that world.
Kendra: This is a great segue into my next question, which is if you had to pick another genre to record an album in, what would it be?
Josh: Folk, or Country
Harlee: We always said that we would make a folksy album one day. That is where we’ve always started. I also think we’d make a killer country album.
Josh: And I feel like with dream-pop there’s this sort of cosmic vibe, and I think country and western has that too and could weave itself in and out of that genre easily.
Kendra: Amazing! Besides the release of your album, what is next that you’re the most excited about?
Harlee: We’re going on tour soon, and we’ll be opening for a lot of amazing acts, and we’re going to have our headlining tour at the end of the year. We’ve been thinking about what the next era of live shows is going to look like. Our dream is that we turn into an electronic jam band where there could be more improvisation and really talented musicians. We have a lot of really talented musicians around us, so it is gonna be really great getting to have our friends come play with us. The growth of the band is really exciting right now.
Josh: Yeah, I’m kind of excited about the same thing. We’re touring so much this year, and we’re touring so much for the next couple of years. To get to like up the stage show under our control, like designing a light now. We love performing our songs, and it’s going to be so much more exciting when we get to perform them in a more intentional way.
