Delayed by the unfortunate climate events in the North Island of New Zealand, and following a high profile support for New Zealand’s other pop magician Lorde‘s tour, the magnificent singer/producer/multi-instrumentalist Fazerdaze (the nom de plume for Amelia Murray) has just released her stunning new single ‘Flood Into’.
The final track off her recent EP ‘Break!’ (nominated by us as one of our favourite antipodean releases last year), this is a spacious delight with Fazerdaze’s trademark rhythmic guitars and her ethereal vocals floating across the sky. The chorus is a melodic, anthemic delight with sweeping strings and ghostly bridges.
The themes of the track reflect Fazerdaze’s own personal struggles that saw her leave the music scene for a number of years after the release of the epic debut ‘Morningside’: the pain of absolute love and devotion that can subsume and overpower, and the concomitant need to escape and grow:
I let myself get lost in you
I gave it all too much too much too soon
and within you I would disappear
so when I wanted me I wasn’t there
and when your hands searched through searched through the sheets
Trying to find the empty shell of me
but I have finally found the strength to leave
I felt myself flood back, flood into me
Murray says of the track:
‘Flood Into’ is about a deep love and loss, and the reclamation of myself at the end of that cycle. It’s the feeling of my own energy rushing to fill me back up again. I wrote Flood Into in anticipation of a break up. The song embodies all the melancholy I felt from letting go of someone I loved in order to walk my own path and learn to stand in my own frame again.
This is a perfect dream pop song with the euphoria of a Burt Bacharach standard and a hazy, haunting refrain filled with a delicious melancholia. Fazerdaze is quite frankly one of New Zealand’s best musical exports – which given the high quality of music coming from that region is something rather special.
‘Flood Into’ and ‘Break!’ are out though out through Partisan Records (section 1)/Flying Nun Records and available through all the usual download and streaming sites here. You can get ‘Break!’ through the link below.
Feature Photograph: Joey Cluff
