My Idea, the new duo comprised of Palberta's Lily Konigsberg and Water From Your Eyes' Nate Amos, shared the final single before the release of their debut album CRY MFER on April 22 via Hardly Art—and, let me tell you, it's a banger, albeit a modest one. Amos' voice is robotic, veiled in vocal effects. "I don’t wanna be outside / I just want to breathe you," he sings in the opening verse. It's an earnest couplet that might mislead one from the track's silliness. "Breathe You" nose dives into absurdity—at least Amos' parts—that pokes fun at the ridiculousness of romantic pop songs and maybe even the wild urges that love and lust encourage. The following lines go: "Something in the way you move / Just makes me want to suck you up / I can’t wait for the next time I get to fuck you."
“‘Breathe You’ was never really intended to be on the album," Amos shared in a press release. "I made the hook/beat in the middle of a night when I was unable to sleep and sent it to Lily as a sort of ‘check out how ridiculous this is’ joke; she recorded the verses and sent it back within a day. This was during a really difficult time for both of us and we were processing our emotions in very different ways—I buried my sadness inside of humor and Lily wore hers on her sleeve."
Amos also revealed the track started while he was “high as shit in [his] room making fun of Justin Bieber,” while Lily's parts were recorded while “blindly sad” and “genuinely devastated.” Konigsberg's delivery doesn't have the mask of vocal manipulation—instead, her voice is soft and vulnerable. "I’ve been in a bad place, you already knew this," she candidly offers up at one point, later singing about a photograph's destruction that seems symbolic ("And I don’t know why you cut yourself out / It seems kind of fucked up, doesn’t it to you?") and her declining tolerance for a relationship's woes.
Amos continued on about how the track made the album's final cut: “After it was finished we both forgot about it for months, eventually adding it to the album at the request of a few trusted friends. In spite of the absurdity of the song at a basic level it ended up being as honest and accurate as anything we've made, and it took us months to realize that. Usually I hand off my vocal parts to Lily, but this is one of a few moments where my demo vocals remain in the final cut. We are both really really proud of this song. It is not particularly easy for either of us to listen to but we hope that you (!) like it and find some consolation in it (whatever you may be dealing with at this time).”
The single comes with a video directed by Amos' Water From Your Eyes' bandmate Rachel Brown, which you can watch below. You can also pre-order CRY MFER here.
