Sam of Yumi Zouma shares new song as Zen Mantra

Sam Perry of Yumi Zouma shares the warped and woozy first single from his solo psych-pop project Zen Mantra: “Second Skin” elicits an eerie nostalgia and the inescapable tinge of vague melancholy that tends to go along with that, but there’s a brightness that comes from Perry’s pop sensibility shining through the song's dark undertones. Sam says of the new record:

"My second Zen Mantra record was written over the course of the last three or so years, and thus it covers a lot of emotional ground for me - I practically spent half of my teenage years writing it and grew up a lot in the process...Years went by, years spent finishing high school, falling in love, touring the world for the first time and coping with the sudden death of my father, my relationships changed, my relationship to music changed - I scrapped a few records, and the one I ended up finishing got bent severely out of shape.

When I started out making music I wanted everything to sound huge. My ideal sound was ambient, polished, compressed, driving and loaded with hooks. Some kind of blissful, stadium sized psych-pop project. In the end I wanted to make something that felt like a pop record, but with an underlying sense of dissonance. Something that for most part is quite energetic and rhythm heavy, but without forgoing any atmospheric qualities."

Zen Mantra is out April 15th on New Zealand's legendary Flying Nun Records.