For songwriter Sjur Lyseid, pop-punk is less a vehicle for broadly transmitting heartache and youthful angst as it is a format for exploring nostalgia, with his soon-to-be trilogy of EPs with his project Flight Mode serving as a sort of travelog documenting not only the different locations in which he’s lived, but also the personal anxieties he wrestled with during the time periods he was stationed there. After exploring his teenhood in Texas on 2021’s TX, ’98 and his mid-twenties in Norway on the following year’s Torshov, ’05, Lyseid will return early next year with his next EP Tøyen, ’13—the three releases together constituting a proper full-length titled The Three Times—to continue the story.
Before then, we’re getting a taste of the new release with its lead single “Hyperventilate,” which leans into the lofty power-pop of Nada Surf complemented by backing vocals by Natalie Evans to address this chapter of Lyseid’s life. “‘Hyperventilate’ is a snippet of existential anxiety, dressed up in mundane scenery and disguised as a life-affirming power-pop gem,” he shares. “Like most Flight Mode songs it deals with the passing of time and the distance we have to travel, tangled up with changing identities and architectural and geographical changes in the city I sometimes refer to as ‘home.’”
Detailing how his surroundings (Tøyen being in central Oslo) inspired the track, he continues: “In 2013, as I was going through a personal and interpersonal crisis of sorts. Oslo had just celebrated its thousandth year anniversary, and there was a big waterfront development going on that was going to thoroughly alter the face of the city. The idea for ‘Hyperventilate’ was conceived as I was sitting by the man-made lake next to Medieval Park, the now-ruined grounds of that 1,000-year-old settlement, contemplating all of this and how I would find my place in it. At least that's how I imagined the scene as I wrote the song 10 years later.”
Check out the track below, and pre-order the The Three Times before it drops in February via Tiny Engines here.
