Listen: Flowers - Sleepy

Sleepy are a three-piece indie pop group from Sydney, and Flowers is their latest track, recorded across multiple bedroom studios in isolation. It bristles with a nervous energy, but with easy vocal harmonies that have a summer-like, slacker vibe about them, despite Sydney’s imminent winter.

Listening to Flowers, you wouldn’t know it had been created during the lockdown. Whilst there is a scuffed-up and silvery lo-fi sound to the song’s guitars and vocals, the song comes together with a cohesiveness that seems hard to imagine is the product of a band who couldn’t be in the same place at the same time.

Appropriately, Flowers is a song about distant relationships, in tribute to lovers “new, old and long lost”. From time-to-time I find myself thinking about the impact of COVID-19 on love... Those that are stuck apart, those that are together, and those that tried to leave. Most, I think of those new loves that had a spark before the vacuum of the pandemic stole much of the oxygen a new love needs to grow. How many people are hoping that the chemistry is still there once they get the chance to reconnect with someone after the lockdown is over?

Much like nature, I expect love will find a way... Not in the commercial, cinematic sense so much as that as long as there is light, carbon dioxide and water, plants grow... And as long as there are people and they can connect, they will find a certain pleasure in those other people they find. People that make them feel seen, whole, understood and secure, and those people that help them understand themselves a little better.

Listen: Leave - MAY BBY & Chris Hue

Leave feels like a lesson in restraint. At a little over two minutes long, it is hard not to be left wanting more. The production is so minimalist - small touches that enhance the bruised, emotional vocal that is granted so much of the centre stage. And yet as subtle as the production work is, this never feels remotely close to a capella. This is a track where the production and vocal feel at one, almost as though they came from the same instrument, and yet they didn’t even come from a same mind.

Based in the Netherlands and growing up near The Hague, Chris Hue followed a passion for music to study electronic music production at the Rock Academy in Tilburg. His debut EP has been created together with fellow-Netherlands based singer-songwriter MAY BBY.

MAY BBY draws her inspiration from genres as diverse as electronic, alt R&B and hip-hop, but brings them together with a pop styling to her vocals.

All of which is to say, here we witness Hue treat MAY BBY’s vocal performance with an incredible deftness of touch that betrays a confidence all to rare, particularly in a track from a debut EP. Similarly, MAY BBY’s vocal feels mature beyond her 20 years.

The result is fragile, MAY BBY sounds scared of the outside and yet scared of what exists within her: the ability to be hurt, sure, but also the ability to hurt. Leave speaks to the inherent inconsistency in our experience - the perverse reality that we can both be afraid of being left by someone, whilst also being afraid of just what happens if you are the one to leave.

For me, few tracks trigger such an instant, indelible reaction as Leave. Check it out below:

Listen: Juliet - Cal Maro

Inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the song Juliet represents the latest release from Charlotte, NC born and Brooklyn-bred musician Cal Maro.

Maro’s track sidles in with a lump in its throat and its heart on its sleeve. Soulful vocals slide across the surface of Juliet’s sublime production work, which itself consists of deep, throbbing bass and crisp clicks and snaps. It’s a little like what D’Angelo would sound like produced by Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan, which basically means: sublime. Modern, human and cinematic.

Growing up surrounded by music, Maro was inspired by his band-playing father to get his own instrument. Starting with a guitar playing in a hardcore band, Cal began experimenting across various genres, including rock, folk and indie before falling for the grooves and melody of soul and R&B. In 2015, Cal started the Cal Maro project, drawing on influences that include Frank Ocean and James Blake, conjuring a new, modern yet earthy approach to R&B.

Listen: Break In - Urchin

Break In arrives with clouds of bouyant energy, laid back guitars strummed whilst a hushed vocal gradually steps out of the dark… Fingers slowly fall on keys and taught percussion snaps like raindrops hitting the pavement, before suddenly the clouds break and the sun hits your face. Glitchy electronic wraps around you like a festival crowd appearing from nowhere.

Urchin is the musical project of London musician and producer Leo Appleyard. Having originally started life as an 8-piece band that performance at the London Jazz Festival, Urchin has evolved into something entirely different. In 2018, Appleyard took a break from regular gigging and travelled to Australia, where he quickly got lost in Melbourne’s progressive music scene. Enraptured with the mixture of house, disco and modern jazz eminating from the northern districts of Fitzroy and Brunswick, Leo ultimately ended up releasing his debut EP, Take Time, in reflection of a more upbeat and electronic sound.

Urchin’s sophomore EP is Night Light EP and it was made far away from the world of jazz and gigging, capturing the feel of today’s supercharged metropolis (albeit when not in lockdown). Along with Break In, Night Light EP includes three further songs that deal with loss, blame and the determination to keep moving forwards. Check out Break In below to get a taste of what to expect:

Listen: I Thought I Knew Better - I Know The Chief

I Thought I Knew Better is the new single from Melbourne band I Know The Chief. Having originally formed out of a shared love of music, the band initially found pleasure in the simpler trappings of being young and in a band - those first press shots, sharing inspiration and ultimately losing themselves in Melbourne’s music scene. In time the group got deeper into the process itself - producing music in a studio rather than performing live, and the opportunity that provides to create texture, tone and colour.

The result is the kind of bright pastel synths and soft falsettos you hear on I Thought I Knew Better. The vocals soar in a way that is highly reminiscent of Friendly Fires, and the result feels intimidate and yet polished and modern. With big synths that build into an epic, consuming climax, the track establishes an irresistable feeling by its conclusion. In particular the track feels underpinned by deep bass and solid drums, as called out by the artists themselves:

“We had played a version of this track live for a while and I’d always loved the groove but for whatever reason it hadn’t made it out into the world yet. I re-visited it at the end of 2019, re-wrote the lyrics and a lot of the instrumentation and felt like I’d breathed new life into it. As always, there’s a tonne of layering both instrumentally and vocally but with this track I put a particular focus on trying to nail the interplay and feel of the bass and drums.”

Check out I Thought I Knew Better below: