When we last caught up with Nashville-based songwriter Kayla Graninger, she was dodging the rain while performing music from her then-brand-new debut album as Elke, No Pain for Us Here, in the Tennessee capital with the assistance of Paramore’s Zac Farro. Three years (and one EP) later and Elke is back with her sophomore record Divine Urge, which sees Farro return to take on percussion duties while songwriter Jake McMullen joins Graninger on co-production duty. The first single from the record, “Enchanté,” lands somewhere between the blog-era synth-led quirkiness of Chairlift and YACHT and the maximalist radio pop of that same period, with jarring switches in vibe and tempo helping to relay the song’s message regarding the divides between humankind, nature, and technology.
“Nature works together with what’s fighting against it without the opponent knowing. It finds a way to keep growing by adapting.” Graninger philosophizes while introducing the track’s Bérénice Bear Eveno–directed video, which sees the songwriter embodying the aforementioned factions of mankind, technology, and the natural world. “This is why no matter how much we develop as a society, we will always have to return to nature—it is wiser than us and cannot be controlled. Sometimes we as people wish to possess the earth to feel alive, but nature teaches us the opposite, to just be alive is to possess the nature inside us.”
Check out the video below, and pre-order Divine Urge ahead of its October 25 release via Congrats Records here.
