Written by: Oliver Heffron
When Winter and I last spoke, her world was painted in blue. Coming off her sophomore album, What Kind of Blue Are You?—an analog day-dream of fuzzed guitars, dusty drum machines, and snow-covered melancholy recorded during the pandemic, she described the record as a "total reset." I wrote at the time that Winter’s music reminded us how the most relatable work is often the most deeply personal, how her bittersweet nostalgia communicated not in gestures but in colors.
Two years later, we meet again, and Winter’s palette has shifted into bright shades of red. Adult Romantix (out today via Winspear) is not a retreat into solitude but a record alive with motion, longing, and playful melodrama. It is Winter remembering Los Angeles even as she lets it go, wandering through her own history like a city of ghosts, and building songs out of pieces she gathered while moving from place to place.
“I was picking up little fragments of memories as I was packing away,” she tells me. “At the same time, I was kind of opening up my world. I was just a bit of a nomad.”
That nomadic quality is everywhere on the album. Written between tours, in borrowed apartments, in cities that weren’t quite home, the songs shimmer with impermanence. They sound like postcards half-written on the train, letters folded up before the ink was dry. But instead of feeling rootless, Adult Romantix finds energy in its unsettledness, a buoyancy that comes from refusing to stay still.
Los Angeles was the city that shaped Winter as an artist–a decade of basement shows in Echo Park, late nights in desert air, cosmic light leaking into her dream-pop textures. “This album is kind of like my goodbye love letter to L.A.,” she says. She describes the experience not as sadness, but more as that strange ache of looking backward and realizing how close it feels: “There’s something sort of familiar about the past. I think I was being a bit nostalgic for times in the past, and at the same time, making sense of the present.”
Photo Credit: Sophie Hur
That dual pull–backward and forward, sweet and bitter–animates the album. Adult Romantix never tries to exhume the past. Instead, it acknowledges how memory lives in the present, shaping it, coloring it, making every goodbye also a beginning.
Where What Kind of Blue Are You? compressed inward, Adult Romantix splits open. The songs are more direct, less mist-shrouded, with the confidence of someone returning to the music that first taught them how to play. “I was just kind of craving a return to indie,” she tells me. “A return to the songwriting that I grew up learning how to play. Just like solid songs and a little bit more band vibes. I would say this album is a return to indie rock.”
That return doesn’t erase the dream-pop haze, but it sharpens its edges. Produced with longtime collaborator Joo Joo Ashworth and mixed by Henry Stoehr (Slow Pulp), the record balances its atmosphere with clarity. The well-placed guest verses also expand the album's scope with Horse Jumper of Love bringing gravity to “Misery,” Tanukichan drifting across the twilight of “Running,” and Alex G’s Samuel Acchione adding shimmer to “Without You.” Each collaboration feels less like ornament than community, as if Winter’s world has widened without losing its intimacy.
The record is less about romance than about the ambiguity of love itself — the way platonic and romantic blur, the way longing spills across boundaries. “There’s a lot of different types of love that inspired this record,” she explains. “The lines of the platonic and the romantic are so curious to me. The subtle things of that little spectrum—I think it’s really cool.”
That spectrum glows most clearly in “Just Like a Flower,” the album’s opening track, which could just as easily be read as a confession to a lover, a dedication to a friend, or a note to herself. Winter resists definition. “I think everyone has a corner of their mind that has those fantasies and that kind of private place inside of your head,” she says. “I’m more interested in that. I think friendship is super important. I think self-love is super important.”
On “Without You,” Winter sings partly in Portuguese, her first language. “I actually really want to try to incorporate more Portuguese into my songs,” she says. “It’s just kind of a personal language. It’s the language I talk to with my family.” The shift into Portuguese feels less like performance than like opening a diary–a sudden intimacy, as if the listener is overhearing something not meant for them, but shared anyway.
If the language roots the album in home, its imagery expands outward, folding together gothic and romantic registers. Winter cites Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein alongside ‘90s rom-coms as inspirations, and somehow the juxtaposition feels seamless.
Photo Credit: Sophie Hur
“With Winter, there’s always the light and the shadow,” she says. “I do love exploring the darkness, the shadow side. Frankenstein can be a symbol for the metaphor of our own inner monsters that we feed. They’re not that scary, but because we deny them and because we don’t pay attention to them, they just get angry and bigger.”
That darkness hums beneath the record, but never overwhelms it. Like Shelley’s monster, it is stitched into something tender, awkward, and alive.
Winter is already sketching ways to extend the album visually with “long version” videos, vignettes, experiments in form–like the recent music video and short film for “Hide-A-Lullaby (feat. Tanukichan).” “I hope that it can connect with people in any way,” she tells me. “The location thing, it’s just more of a muse. But I think everyone has someone in their life that impacted them in a positive way. I do think it’s really beautiful to just take a moment to reflect on how those experiences, the ones you want to cherish, kind of changed you.”
Listening to Adult Romantix, I’m reminded of what she told me in 2022: that winter, as a season and a mood, has always been her space to explore the bittersweet, the melancholic, the imaginative. Two years later, that exploration feels larger. It feels less like snow-covered solitude and more like a "tunnel of summers," as she calls it. Winter’s gift has always been to make that bittweseet liminal space feel like home, wherever she might be.