Isaac Winemiller’s ‘In this Light’ Is a Breakup Song Two Years in the Making
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The Bozeman-based bedroom-pop artist returns with Solar Eclipse, a double single that took shape - and fell apart, and came back together - in real time alongside the relationship it documents…
There is a particular kind of song that cannot be rushed. Not because the writer lacks the craft, but because the subject matter refuses to resolve itself on a convenient timeline. Isaac Winemiller’s ‘In this Light’ is that kind of song.
The focus track from his new double single Solar Eclipse, out 22nd May 2026, spent the better part of two years in various states of completion; a demo that kept getting pulled back open, reworked, and set aside again. The reason, Winemiller has been candid about, is straightforward: the relationship the song was documenting hadn’t finished happening yet. “The relationship went through repeated cycles of breaking up, reconnecting, and falling apart again,” he explains, “and the song carried all of that tension, confusion, pain, and emotional exhaustion with it. In many ways, it felt impossible to truly finish the song until I had finally moved on emotionally.”
That kind of biographical entanglement with the creative process is not unusual in songwriting, but what makes the trajectory of ‘In this Light’ distinctive is how cleanly it maps onto Winemiller’s broader artistic philosophy. For him, every release functions as a diary entry: a fixed point of honesty captured at a specific emotional coordinates. The song could only be completed, in other words, once there was actually an ending to write from.
The result, built entirely in his home studio in Bozeman, Montana, is a track that wears its emotional weight lightly. Shimmering synthesisers - a Juno 60 and a Waldorf feature prominently alongside Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos - sit beneath production that is dance-forward and warmly lit, the kind of music that invites movement even as the lyrics deal in loss and clarity hard won. Winemiller performed every instrument himself with the exception of lead guitar, and handled writing, recording, production, mixing, and mastering across the whole release. It is, structurally and philosophically, a solo endeavour in the fullest sense.
That self-sufficiency has been a defining characteristic of the project since its beginnings. Winemiller grew up in a household where music was simply part of the furniture; his mother a choral director and voice teacher, his father a singer and arranger, his siblings similarly embedded in the craft. He came to his own voice as a singer relatively late, by his own account, and the Isaac Winemiller solo project has always functioned as something separate from and alongside his other work: a space to articulate things that didn’t fit elsewhere.
That other work is not negligible. Since 2015, Isaac has toured internationally as bassist for Vansire (a project with Josh Augustin), which has taken him across the US, through North America, and into Japan, Singapore, and China. A full North American Vansire tour is scheduled for autumn 2026 and into early 2027. He also produces and performs with a growing roster of independent artists, including emerging indie-Americana songwriter Abby Webster. In Montana, he describes himself simply as the local “bass dude” — a workaday description that undersells the breadth of what he actually does.
His solo catalogue has accumulated quietly but meaningfully. His 2021 debut Levels of Removal drew tens of millions of cumulative Spotify streams, earned an editorial Fresh Finds placement, and attracted write-ups from Indie-Shuffle, Obscure Sound, and Kidwithavinyl, among others. His 2025 follow-up Rolling Hills Road extended the blend of romantic lyricism and groove-driven production that has become his signature. Solar Eclipse is the first release since that album, and by Winemiller’s own assessment, his most refined to date… confident in a way that feels earned rather than performed.
That confidence, it seems, came at a cost. Completing ‘In this Light’ meant sitting with the emotional wreckage of a prolonged and painful ending long enough to find something worth saying about it. “Completing it became more than just finishing a track,” he says. “It became part of the healing process itself.” The song, in his framing, stands as testament to resilience and the particular courage required to let go. Whether or not listeners arrive with any of that context, the production carries the feeling - something between relief and longing, movement and stillness, danceable and quietly devastating.
For an artist who cites honesty, vulnerability, and compassion as his three guiding principles, ‘In this Light’ feels like a precise articulation of all three.
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Press Photo by Joshua Augustin