premiere: Maria Somerville – This Way
We've been entranced for weeks by the title track from Galway, Ireland artist Maria Somerville's forthcoming self-released debut LP All My People, an eerie, vaguely foreboding lullaby that Maria says was influenced as much by experimental, ambient, and club music as it was by traditional Irish folk ballads. The result is a kind of gorgeous, hazy, distant-but-intimate dream pop that at times recalls a more bucolic Grouper. Today we're honored to debut another stunning track from the record, and perhaps its most ebullient, poppiest number, "This Way". Despite its relatively sunny melody, "This Way" still glows with a beautifully wistful, spectral aura and an aching longing that permeates Maria's work, as she laments over a lilting, submerged bassline and murky ambience, "All I ever wanted was for you to see me as me". Maria tells us about the song:
"I wrote 'This Way' when a lot of things around me were changing, this song is symbolic of that time. There can be a view from which we see ourselves on a day to day basis and an attachment to who we think we are, 'our story'. I wrote ‘This Way’ through that lens of attachment to the self and detaching from that attachment. Disengaging from the sense of who we think we are, the narrative we build around our lives and slowing down the feedback loop of our minds, arriving at a place of truth, clarity and authenticity."
Maria Somerville's self-titled debut LP is out March 1st.