There are songs that ask for your attention, and then there are songs that just take it. “Under Your Spell,” the new single from Boulder’s The Dirty Turkeys, firmly belongs to the latter category.
I’ll be honest: I’ve been following this band for a while now, and getting this track early felt less like a press courtesy and more like being let in on a secret. By the time it ended, I had already started it over.
The song opens slowly, almost deceptively so. A sparse, raw arrangement cradles Brad Hansen’s vocal, which carries the kind of ache that doesn’t feel performed — it feels remembered. The first minute establishes a mood of quiet devastation, two people and a knife and a game neither of them wanted to play. It’s the Dirty Turkeys at their most restrained, and somehow that makes it hit harder.
Then the tempo breaks open.
The shift from slow burn to full-throttle momentum is the kind of songwriting moment that earns the word “goosebumps,” and I don’t use that word lightly. It’s not a gimmick. It’s a release. When the band locks into that faster groove, it feels inevitable, like the song was always building there and you just didn’t know it yet.
The chorus lands on a heavy, groove-driven foundation — mellow in texture but enormous in weight. “Under your spell” repeated over that thick bassline becomes something close to hypnotic, which is obviously the point, and which works completely. It’s the kind of hook that embeds itself without asking permission.
What strikes me most across the song’s arc is how intentional its structure feels. The verses carry tension, the chorus provides release, and the bridge — arriving after a guitar solo that deserves its own paragraph — pushes into something rawer and more frantic before the whole thing circles back to where it started. The closing stretch, returning to that same slow, bare arrangement from the opening, feels genuinely full circle. The song breathes out the same way it breathed in.
The Dirty Turkeys have always operated in the space between psychedelia, punk and something that feels distinctly American and slightly unhinged in the best possible way. “Under Your Spell” doesn’t abandon any of that, but it does something more refined — it builds a complete emotional arc and sticks the landing.
This is a band that already won a Best Acid-Rock Band award at the 2025 Best of Denver. If “Under Your Spell” is any indication of where they’re headed next, that’s going to look like the beginning of a much longer story.
All photos by @_dystortion_
