“There’s a warehouse at the top of Main Street in my tiny town that’s being turned into a museum for Shaker art,” Rose described when discussing the song’s meaning. “It’s just down the road from my house, so I pass by it all the time. When I wrote ‘The Museum,’ I was thinking about how sort of beautifully delusional it is to create a museum at a time when the world is reaching the apex of climate crisis. This idea of preserving pieces of furniture in a pristine, white-walled space when outside, everything is collapsing.”

She continued, adding: “I’d also read a headline about how people were vacationing in Iceland at an active volcano, and that seemed to hold the same feeling for me as the museum-under-construction. Tourism at the brink of apocalypse. Meanwhile, my husband and I were talking about building a family, building a future, and I was grappling with the responsibility of what it means to bring a child into this kind of world—where people pose for selfies while the earth explodes.”

In February 2025, Half Waif will visit Europe for a string of shows in Berlin, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris, and London.