Cheer is the creation of Brenna Friend and Lucas Dages, partners in life and in music for nearly the past decade. Both the band and album names stem from a Wilco lyric, “cheer up//honey I hope you can,” which resonated heavily with their creative journey reaching through personal turmoil, emotional upending, and finally, a delicate yet persistent optimism culminating in their first release - Hope You Can.

The album opens with the final walk through an emptied childhood home before relinquishing the keys to a new owner. Remembering the warm lighting in winter…the once comforting creaks of your parents’ footsteps just down the hall while you laid in bed falling asleep each night now resonate as unsettling and cavernous even in the afternoon light.

Similar to The Arcade Fire’s family tree losing all of its leaves, Cheer finds their knot of yarn that was once tethered to so many things - suburban homes, after school sports, extended family gatherings, is slowly coming undone, leaving them with a ball of string which they now must decide what to do with. This ultimately leads to the realization that these memories and the warm hearth of home live within you now - they must follow you now.

Despite the hopeful warmth, Friend and Dages know all too well of the fragility of constructs as they repeatedly prove to be nothing more than layered paper cut-outs, solely illusory in their sense of security. Yet, through it all, the duo has been unable to shake their pervasively optimistic and romantic roots - the unforgettable feeling on those bright nights under yellow moon when your lover’s eyes (or maybe even the eyes of life itself) appear to shine just for you.

Perhaps inevitably, the band arrives at the familiar, age old question: will we recognize the good times when they come or are they creatures confined to our hindsight? Like many before them, the duo realizes the lack of a concise, catchall answer, but finds comfort in the cautious optimism of hope, the hope that you can.