Listen: Drink Yours Too - SUMif

SUMif blew me away last year with her song Know You, a record that fizzed with the overwhelming feeling of wanting to be completely swallowed whole by a person. The track established Steph Wells as someone for me to keep my eye on, and here she is, back with another dreamy electronic pop record about the unexpected places our feelings can take us.

Where Know You was a record that conveyed the sense of awe another person can instil in you, Drink Yours Too is the opposite - being surprised and disappointed by the person you thought you knew actually turning out to be different.

We live in a world where our relationships take on different dynamics through different mediums. You may find the person from your mundane day job becomes your best friend when you get chatting to them on your phone. You can find yourself falling for the way someone spars on their Twitter account without ever really knowing who they are in their real, day-to-day life.

It’s that warped sense of connection that SUMif tackle here, on a song penned by Wells and Dylan Emmet. As Steph describes:

“This song is about this one time I met someone via Instagram who lived on the other side of the world... we talked and Facetimed for hours for a couple of months, and then I flew from San Francisco to Barcelona for a weekend to meet her... it was a complete fail. no regrets though, I could have spent another 100 hours of my life facetiming/talking with her, but instead I figured it out quickly along with a great story...”

The song itself rides a gentle muted guitar line, which combined with finger clicks manages to create the feeling of excited anticipation. It feels like a journey to meet someone who you already feel in love with the idea of, warm synths hitting you like the heat of Barcelona as you step off the plane.

Sometimes you have to chase what feels right, even if it turns out to be wrong... Love is by definition an experience only made possible by taking risks and putting yourself out there.

Listen: Halo - Nightmøde

Nightmøde is Matt Kass, a writer, producer and multi-instrumentalist who originally hails from Philadelphia but is now based in East Nashville. Following acclaim and streaming success with previous singles Penthouse Refugees, and The Pressure, Nightmøde is back with this, a new single. A collaborative exercise between Kass and Austin Thomas (who works as Spookyghostboy), Halo is a song about the experience of being in a long distance relationship.

You can feel the experience of uncertainty and inconsistency in the music. The feeling of having someone right with you some of the time, but then being aware of their absence as soon as they are gone. The feeling of not knowing quite what is going on with someone when they aren’t with you, of trying to maintain the emotional tenacity to keep that person in mind... close enough to be in a relationship with them but not so close that they become all you think about.

The sound of Halo is hazy, with a chill wave consistency that feels like be lost in daydreams and not being able to maintain a presence with those physically around you. It’s a slightly heartbreaking record - the sound of things not working, not because they weren’t necessarily to be, but simply because it was too hard to figure them out.

Listen: Rare - Shima Banana

Shima Banana is a half-Japanese, half-American singer, producer and engineer from Tokyo. Having previous been signed to a major label in Japan as the member of a J-Pop group, Shima ultimately quit to study music and engineering. Since then she has been working music on her own. Rare is taken from her forthcoming debut EP, and she recorded, produced, mixed and mastered it herself.

Rare enters your ears with a energetic and loose bass line, before creating space for a playful vocal and subsequently a clatter of lively synths. This is a song that delivers a real linear, structured feeling for the listener - it has a series of moments and arranges these in series as opposed to layering them together, creating a distinctive experience, almost like walking between three rooms where you have complimentary but distinct music playing. It’s also what I would generally describe as textural - the rhythms have an almost tangible physicality to them, the synths feel solid, and the whole record boasts this sense of space, like you are in the middle of the sound.

Rare feels all too brief, but the experience of listening to it is a little captivating. As it finishes I feel my brain trying to hold onto the feeling, like trying to keep hold of water that is destined to slip through your fingers. There is a break midway through the song that teases you, making you think the song is over before it is... And every time it comes back in at that point it brings me a little joy.

Listen: Faith Over Fear - Rachel K Collier

Faith Over Fear is the latest single from Welsh electronic musician Rachel K Collier, and represents the latest to come in support of her debut LP.

The song itself arrives in a flurry of percussion and vocal samples, Rachel K Collier’s vocal slowly unwinding atop of a deep electronic wall-of-sound. The song works its way towards a notable peak, the chorus fully unshackling those vocals as the instrumentation falls into a full-on progressive house sound.

This is a statement of intent - a whispered form of encouragement to oneself, to keep going... To persevere, to overcome fear. You can feel Collier’s own desire to keep moving, musically Faith Over Fear accelerates with the sense of propulsion of someone who just wants to get there, to not look down. It’s a clatter of drums, an overwhelming bass groove, a delicate human in the middle of it all.

Rachel describes the song, and how she has had to overcome the criticism and the detractors and instead just focus on where she wants to get to:

“Faith Over Fear is a song that I wrote as a message to remind myself never to give in to the doubts, fears and negative thoughts my brain sometimes likes to taunt me with - even when I was writing this song they were loud and proud telling me that what I was writing was terrible - I hope it helps others on a mission or who are going through a creative process to overcome the fears and go kick ass!”

Listen: Lie Down - FYOHNA

FYOHNA’s Lie Down is the kind of sultry pop music that initially feels like a sensual ode to a significant other. As vocalist Katarina Gleicher asks “Who loved you better?”, it feels like a threat, but could just as easily be a rhetorical question... perhaps no-one has the capacity for unconditional love that we hold in ourselves. It’s a view Gliecher puts forward in her experience of the song:

“When I think about the question this song is asking and the answer I get from it, it’s ‘Who loved you better?' I loved me better. No one can hold me like me and no one can love me like me.”

Regardless of who the song is about, the thick, heady production work gives this all a heavy, erotically charged feeling. Distorted bass, powerful drums and overdubbed vocals create the feeling of being swallowed up whole in the music. It’s disorientating, a little like love. It feels emotionally charged and physically dangerous. And that cover art just tips it’s hat at the suggestion that even loving oneself doesn’t have to lack that sense of physical excitement.