Song of the Day: “Like Little Soldiers” by The Tea Club

A bit fractured, a bit scary, but still something beautiful.

Jan 05, 2026

After a six-year hiatus that felt long enough for the band members to actually grow, dry, package, and market their own line of artisanal organic teas, Philadelphia’s The Tea Club returned in late 2025 with Chasm.

Their previous work, If/When, was a sprawling psychedelic epic which I thoroughly enjoy, but Chasm drops the twenty-seven-minute “prog-symphony” in favor of dense, introspective, slightly dissonant, and remarkably polished four-minute snapshots that explore existential confusion (how very “2026” of them).

The McGowan brothers (Daniel and Patrick) still provide those reedy, soaring vocal harmonies but the instrumentation is twitchy and nervous. The rhythms shift constantly, like a person trying to find a comfortable sitting position in a chair made of rocks. It’s “Prog” for the modern age… It doesn’t waste your time with 10-minute drum solos; it just hits you with a strange time signature, a haunting lyric about “lizard eyes,” and quickly moves on to the next crisis.

If you’re going to name an album after a giant hole in the ground, you need a song that effectively shoves the listener into it. “Like Little Soldiers” does exactly that, but it does so with a polite, melodic smile that makes the descent almost pleasant (after the nearly one minute intro crescendo). On this track, Daniel and Patrick’s voices weave together so tightly in the choruses they practically become a single entity. It sets the thematic tone for the entire record—with all the complexity of a 15-minute prog epic distilled into a concentrated four minute shot of espresso.