Every 14 February runs on the same fuel: cheap wine, expensive expectations, and a stiff upper lip bracing for whatever the night decides to hand out. The enigmatic chanteuse Tanya-Lee Davies has always known exactly what to do with a room like that, and on ‘Valentines Day’ — out tomorrow, September 17 — she walks straight into it with a vibraphone in one hand and a knife behind her back in the other. We are truly honoured to bring you an exclusive listen to the new single.
Nobody walks into the fourteenth of February without a little armour on. Davies knows this better than most, and rather than writing another song about roses and reservations, she’s written one about what happens after the candles get blown out and somebody’s had one drink too many to keep pretending. ‘Valentines Day’ is that song, and it’s one of the sharpest things she’s put her name to.
Melbourne via Western Australia, TLD has spent four albums — ‘Perfect Moment’, ‘Bloom’, ‘Superdarling’ and 2022’s ‘Dreamland’ — building a psychic home somewhere between Laurel Canyon, the Brill Building and a Nashville bus trip gone gloriously wrong. I called ‘Dreamland’ a wonderful realm of slow-burning vignettes that simmer with a melodic intensity back in 2022, and ‘Adam and Eve’ the following year found her still telling saucy tales in her own inimitable style. This new single — the follow-up to ‘You Know It’s Autumn’ and another preview of her forthcoming 2027 album — keeps that same warmth in her voice, but there’s a colder draught blowing through the room this time.
It opens unhurried, almost tender, the kind of hush you’d get right before somebody says something they can’t take back. TLD lets the tension sit rather than resolving it, and there’s a definite echo of Rowland S. Howard in how comfortably she lets prettiness turn menacing — nothing so overt as leather and switchblades, just a slow tightening of the screws until the song’s back half arrives with real weight behind it and the harmonies start sounding less like comfort and more like a warning. By the time she sings that there’s hell to pay, you don’t doubt her for a second.
The closing sleight of hand is the real coup: a smoky voice slips into the mix late, delivering the song’s cruellest arithmetic in a single line – one plus one only equals two, if one of them’s me and one of them’s you, and it recasts everything that came before. It’s a classic TLD move — she’ll lull you in with the prettiest possible instrumentation and then land the gut-punch almost as an aside.
Behind the scenes it’s a genuine ensemble effort, with Amy Valent Curlis on percussion and vibes, Ben Franz on bass, Charlie Owen’s lap steel, and Shane Reilly contributing both string arrangement and electric guitar, engineered and mixed by Roger Bergodaz (who also plays drums) and mastered by Colin Wynne.
This is a slow simmering pot of lingering regret delivered in a late night hazy saloon, delicious and tempting but oh so deadly. Davies just keeps getting better and better.
‘Valentines Day’ is out everywhere tomorrow, September 17. Have a listen and maybe in a deliciously politically incorrect moment, light up something and pour yourself a stiff drink before you do. Indulgence never felt so good.
