There's a particular kind of quiet that exists after rainfall in the Australian bush — heavy air, dripping canopies, creeks running just a little fuller than usual. Serena Rose has managed to bottle that feeling on her latest single.
The Melbourne-based artist, whose work straddles film composition and psychedelic songwriting, released "Wild One" on March 20th — a track that feels less like a song and more like a place you've stumbled into. Recorded with the fog-draped hinterland of Byron Bay clearly in her bones, it's a slow, unhurried thing; guitars that drift rather than drive, percussion that barely announces itself, and an atmosphere that rewards patience.
Rose came to music through film scoring, and it shows — not in any showy cinematic way, but in the way she thinks about sound spatially. Guitars are spread wide across the stereo field, the arrangement breathes rather than fills, and the whole production seems less interested in telling you something than in putting you somewhere. Think less verse-chorus-verse and more the particular stillness of standing alone in a wet forest.
"I kept seeing the same setting," she has said of the writing process — creeks, fog, the aftermath of rain. The track arrived quickly, written in a single session, and that spontaneity lingers in the recording's loose, unhurried feel.
Comparisons to Mazzy Star are inevitable and earned, but "Wild One" also carries the kind of dynamic restraint you'd associate with Radiohead at their most atmospheric — sound used as negative space as much as anything else.
It's a quietly arresting piece of work from an artist who seems entirely uninterested in announcing herself loudly — which, paradoxically, makes her rather hard to ignore.
Stream the new single in the player below
