We always think we have a plan. We will walk into a situation with a purpose and an idea, only to find that life has other things in store for us. Goon frontman and creative mastermind, Kenny Becker, had a record’s worth of new songs ready to record, studio time booked, and a vision for how it would all play out. But weeks into the recording, life hit him like a lightning bolt in the form of the sudden dissolution of his marriage and his subsequent psychic spiral. Blindsided by heartbreak, the music Becker had written for the record began to take on new meaning. What had come from joy was now something closer to agony. In the friction of that moment, Becker pushed his band—and his songwriting—into stranger territory. Facing down the pain and disappointment of life, the band created a masterpiece with their new album, Dream 3. Goon began in 2015 as singer and multi-instrumentalist, Kenny Becker’s, solo project, releasing a compilation of his best home recordings, the 2016 EP Dusk of Punk. With a full band in tow, Goon released the band’s first full-length, 2019’s Heaven is Humming on Partisan Records. Becker recruited a new band—Andy Polito on drums, Dillon Peralta on guitar, and Tamara Simons on bass—and recorded the self-released Paint By Numbers 1. A second LP, Hour of Green Evening, soon followed, as well as another EP, Red Ladder, in 2022. To support Hour of Green Evening, Goon hit the road hard, touring and playing shows with Built to Spill, Jadu Heart, Slow Pulp, Teethe, Squirrel Flower, and many others. In the midst of all this, the band signed with Philadelphia label Born Losers and began recording their next LP with Claire Morison at Wild Horizon Sound in Los Angeles. Dream 3 melds the intimate, lo-fi stylings of Goon with the live-band sound of Hour of Green Evening; a veteran band exploring every aspect of their sound, pushing themselves into new musical and emotional realms. The result is an often darker, more introspective album, built on personal loss and the chaotic crumbling of the outside world, without losing Goon’s signature sense of strangeness and wonder. Weaving lyrics about personal and ecological collapse with references to baseball, aliens, and Tony Soprano, the record expands Goon’s sound while holding close to the core identity of the band. Dream 3 offers an exquisitely crafted sonic world, one full of heartbreak and pain, but also brimming with color and life, the hope of better days to come. Dream 3 is a startling progression for Goon, a record filled with pain and heartbreak, yes, but healing as well. For all the imagery of death and decay, it’s also suffused with light—“lace light,” “half light,” “light through an orb weaver,” “morning light,” “microwave light, “flashlight,” “sunlight.” It’s the light that makes things happen, causes plants to grow, sets the world alive. And it’s in the light we find ourselves changing, in our fiercest struggles and in our quiet moments, always on the verge of becoming something new again. Dream 3, with its pain and troubled beginning, is a testament to the slow work of the light cutting through even the darkest places.