The title track, meanwhile, sounds like the sun rising after a wild night, with bird song (and his pal Damon Albarn’s distinctive vocals) guiding you home as the darkness ebbs away. Elsewhere, the euphoric ‘Go’ begins with ASMR-friendly sounds of running water, with bouncy hooks and lush production later erupting into a jubilant floor-filler. On the cinematic ‘Jasper’s Song’, trilling piano arpeggios are pulled and pushed through woozy processors – it’s the equivalent of a stoned geezer boshing out a Ludovico Einaudi piece on a short-circuiting keyboard. The results of this shift see Streten’s distinctive sonics imbued with an ethereal twist. The move shook him out of a creative rut: “Coming here and doing fuck all made it possible to unblock whatever was going on”. “I just need the space and the peace and quiet,” he told NME of the move in a recent interview for our In Conversation video series, explaining that the chilled lifestyle, where he could live among local wildlife, ended up being extremely conducive to his process. Inspired by the natural world, the project was first started in LA, but finished in his native Australia, where he decamped as the COVID-19 pandemic began. Third record ‘Palaces’ sees this sound infused with something more, though. READ MORE: Five things we learned from our In Conversation video chat with Flume He’s known for left-field sounds that ping with electricity tracks that are meant to be heard on big, bassy festival sound systems in the early hours of the morning. For the past decade the artist – real name Harley Streten – has crafted fluorescent tunes that have won him a Grammy (second album ‘Skin’ took the trophy for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2017 ceremony) and helped him sell out venues across the globe. “Say Nothing,” despite its title, suggests a lot of future boundary-pushing on behalf of these two artists, and even if this is one of the only times they share the studio, I have a strong gut feeling that what they’ve put up in this performance is going to be potent enough among listeners to win them a lot of affection and long-term support from around the underground.Flume has perfected his own brand of wonky electronic music. May-A adds a definitive splash of personality, and between the two of them the harmonies they’re able to cultivate at the front of the mix alone make this a worthwhile listen in my book.įlume and May-A are on top of their game in this single and music video, both of which should be considered must-see content for indie pop fans this month. Contrarily, I can see where a song devoid of conventionality at the verse could express so much more to us with its textural and tonal presence than it ever would in a straightforward setting, and I believe this is where Flume was at when he developed the foundation of the track. Lyrically speaking, “Say Nothing” is enigmatic to no end, but I don’t think it lacks any sense of emotional depth because of this. I don’t normally say this, but this is an instance where an overwhelming layout is a lot more conducive to the story these players are looking to tell than anything more conservative and mainstream would have been, and it’s something I want to see Flume toy with again soon. The music video for “Say Nothing” is quite the extension of the eccentric points in the composition, if not a reimagining of the narrative through dreamy imagery capable of being as nightmarishly surreal as it is compositely colorful where it matters the most. There’s nothing here that sounds unnecessary or placed in the arrangement just for dramatic effect, and next to most of the pop I’ve been hearing out of the underground recently, the ambitiousness of this framework is something to write home about. While I would have liked just a little less pushiness from the bassline in the chorus, I really appreciate the overall fluidity of the instruments beyond the percussion, which is the most rigid component of the track. This single was structured to be cerebral, with the mixing of the vocals perhaps serving as the most mind-bending component of the hook.
Flume’s latest release brings on a worthy collaborator in May-A cosmetically, and as far as their aesthetical experimentation goes, this is a performance that puts both of their skillsets to the test – with the two players ultimately emerging from “Say Nothing” having said an awful lot about pop music in general. The intertwining vocals of Flume and May-A in the new single “Say Nothing” are indeed stunning on their own, but when layered amidst the discordant instrumentation in the foreground of the master mix, they become a hypnotic beacon through which we can learn a lot about both of these impressive artists.
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