FINGER

Day one, and we're starting with a song that's built to get stuck in your head and stay there, whether you like what it's saying or not.

FINGER is the third single from Nostalgia, the tenth studio album from Vancouver's Mother Mother, released June 6, 2025 to mark the band's twentieth year. Ryan Guldemond wrote it and co-produced it with Jason Van Poederooyen. It runs 2:59 and wastes none of it.

What it sounds like

It opens like a machine warming up: whirring synths, a stuttering drum pattern, an acoustic guitar plucked like it's being poked. Then the band's secret weapon arrives, the stacked harmonies of Molly Guldemond and Jasmin Parkin, eerie and sugary at once, with Ryan's yelps and ad-libs cutting across the top. Somewhere in there are noises that sound like birds. It's post-glam, a little theatrical and twitchy in the way that made "Hayloft" and "Arms Tonite" blow up on TikTok years after they came out.

The hook lands on the first listen and gets worse (better?) with every one after. That's the earworm test, and it passes easily.

What it's about

Guldemond called FINGER "the long-lost sibling of 'Verbatim'," the 2005 cult favorite where he sang frankly about bodies and gender in a way that still gets fans talking. Fans have asked for a "Verbatim II" for years, and this is as close as they'll get.

The title is the whole thesis: the finger that points. The song lines up a series of things society shames people for, and points back at the people doing the shaming. Guldemond has named three targets:

• The sexual double standard. A woman with a lot of partners gets judged; a man with the same number gets congratulated. Same behavior, opposite verdicts.
• The animal class system. Why is one animal family and another one dinner? The line we draw between pets and food is mostly habit dressed up as logic.
• Masculine shame. Straight men who are curious about pleasures that aren't coded as "manly" are taught to feel embarrassed for wanting them.

What ties them together is arbitrariness. None of these rules come from anywhere solid. They're inherited, enforced by a raised eyebrow or a pointed finger, and the song's trick is to stack them side by side until the whole system looks as silly as it is. Read that way, the jump from bedrooms to dinner plates isn't random: it's the point. If you can see how arbitrary the pet-or-food rule is, maybe you'll notice the others.

The video

Director Sterling Larose, a longtime collaborator, sets it in a suburbia where everything is slightly wrong. A couple with plastered-on smiles moves through ordinary scenes that keep curdling: stuffed poultry, a man roasting in the sun, a milkman at the door, and the band themselves living inside paintings on the wall. Eagle-eyed fans will spot artwork from the band's 2005 debut, Mother. It's a picture-perfect home where the rules make no sense, which is exactly what the song is describing.

Where it falls short

Here's the honest part. FINGER is a list song, and list songs trade depth for momentum. Three big targets in under three minutes means each one gets a jab, not an argument. The sexual double standard is a real thing that hurts real people, and it shares the runway with a pets-versus-food bit that, on a bad day, plays like a stoner observation. The song trusts you to connect the dots, and plenty of listeners will just hear a cheeky mix of sex jokes and steak.

It's also writing to a crowd that already agrees. Since the 2020 TikTok revival, Mother Mother's audience skews young, online and deeply on board with their politics. FINGER flatters that audience more than it challenges anyone outside it. That's fine for a single, but it's safer than the song's swagger suggests.

And the "sibling of Verbatim" framing invites a comparison FINGER doesn't fully win. "Verbatim" felt raw and a little dangerous because nobody was doing it. FINGER is polished, self-aware and in on its own joke, a twenty-year-old band remembering what being provocative felt like. That's fitting for an album called Nostalgia, but nostalgia for edge isn't the same as edge. Critics broadly liked the record (it sits around 67 on Album of the Year), and "good, not great" is a fair read on the album. FINGER is one of its sharpest moments.

Why it's today's song

Because it's the Tasty Tunes idea in one track: sweet on the outside, sharp underneath. You'll hum it before you've decided whether you agree with it, and by the third listen you'll be thinking about the arguments it skipped. A song that sticks and makes you think a little is the best kind of earworm, so it's a fitting first pick.

If you like this

• Mother Mother, "Verbatim": the 2005 original that FINGER is answering.
• Mother Mother, "Hayloft": the twitchy, harmony-stacked breakout that found a second life online.
• Mother Mother, "Make Believe": the Nostalgia lead single, which peaked at No. 11 on Canadian modern rock radio.