Sydney trio Mansionair have teamed up with Germany’s NoMBe to create the perfect riposte to the horrors of 2020 with the new single ‘Guillotine’.
Rather than providing a panacea for the pain, ‘Guillotine’ perfectly captures and shines back the sense of claustrophobia and unsettling nature of the year with its languid speaking verses and the rousing chorus. It’s a thumping cool electronic session with a therapist. Jack Froggat from Mansionair describes ‘Guillotine as speaking:
…to all those thoughts that endlessly pile up in your brain, it’s a tongue-in-cheek response to those feelings – wanting to switch off your mind to the noise. With such a heavy year almost gone it’s a track to hopefully lighten the mood, shake off the pressure and carry on. After touring with NoMBe back in 2018 we had the thought of a collab on the back-burner… with all this time to write this year we finally found some space to do it.
Noah McBeth, aka NoMBe, explains:
Guillotine is about feeling overwhelmed with it all…sort of like ‘I feel my head is about to explode so might as well just chop it off’… it’s been such a crazy year on top of the pressures of releasing music right now and I think Mansionair and I funnelled all of that into this track.
The accompanying lyric video somehow captures the mental fuzziness and internal dialogues we have all been having in isolation:
Cathartic and very satisfying. ‘Guillotine’ is out now through Liberation Records and you can download/stream it here.
Mansionair and NoMBe first met on Sirius XM Alt Nation’s Advanced Placement Tour in 2018, where they quickly hit it off and planned to collaborate. But life intervened and they were both kept busy on subsequent tours. Then 2020 hit, finally affording them with the time they needed to create music together.
