Graduating from playing in a handful of post-punk and math-pop outfits gracing the Canadian scene in the 2010s, Eliza Niemi went solo with a pair of EPs in 2019 and 2020, with 2022’s full-length Staying Mellow Blows to follow. She’s already found her niche within chamber-pop as an outsider voice, given her background in avant-garde rock bands (also, calling an album of singer-songwriter compositions “Staying Mellow Blows” is really funny), and she continues to carve out space for her project as a sort of alternate-universe Violent Femmes with its forthcoming successor, Progress Bakery.
Following the release of the acoustic-guitar-led lead single “Do U FM,” Niemi is returning with another pre-album track today that’s a fascinating balance of unconventional cello sounds and colorful percussion. “I wrote this on my Casio CA-100 with one of the dorky preset grooves,” Niemi explains of the composition. “Then I layered cello on top of it and took the preset groove away for the bulk of the song. I used some freaky extended techniques on the cello to give it a sort of seasick, chaotic feel.”
The lyrics, meanwhile, are fairly self-referential when it comes to the song’s compositional sense of conflict, with an initial idea sparking a full tournament’s worth of other, mostly unrelated tensions for Niemi. “My friend Mark told me once that he writes songs while he’s driving and records them on a little cassette player attached to the dash,” she explains. “This really stuck with me. It made me think about the concept of recording an idea versus letting it float away, which in turn got me thinking about a series of tensions: movement versus stasis, improvisation versus orchestration, cassette player versus phone, work of art versus commodity, leather versus pleather, possessing something versus setting it free.”
Check out the track below, and pre-order Progress Bakery here.
