Fans of chamber-pop group Daughter will be delighted by the brilliant songs frontwoman Elena Tonra has cooked up for Save As, her second solo LP under the Ex:Re moniker. Tonra’s first full-length project since 2018’s self-titled debut, this latest 4AD-released album is built around the sort of observations that animate all great narrative work. As she explains of opener “Radio Station,” which features an acoustic guitar melody that would fit in on The Bends, “I won’t write for months, but I’ll pick up all these little pieces and hopefully at a later point they’ll make sense to me.”
The album consists of these little moments, sewn and stitched together. Tonra brilliantly allows the seams to show, presenting a work that’s polished but never made artificial. That rawness breaks all the way through on closing track “Healing (Slow),” which is a literal examination of the song title. “This song has often felt difficult to play through the emotional weight of it. Some songs are like that: they never really get easier with time, just repeatedly transport me back to the memory very intensely,” Tonra explains. Whether examining moments big or small, little thoughts that tickle or larger ones that take her back to the most poignant moments of grief, Tonra sings with urgency and beauty.
With the record out today, check out her full track-by-track breakdown of Save As below. You can also grab a copy of the record here.
1. “Radio Station”
The lyrics of this song are made up of lots of fragments—overheard conversations, memories, thoughts, observations—all collected together over a long stretch of time. I like to think of it like a vacuum cleaner. I won’t write for months, but I’ll pick up all these little pieces and hopefully at a later point they’ll make sense to me. It’s a road trip: long drives in California, lots of coffee, and wondering how I can keep hold of this moment forever, already anxious about the loss. “Radio Station” is how I feel about my mind and all its indecision.
2. “Sleep”
I wrote this song many years ago; I was in Paris and had a heavy heart. I needed some time away from London, and getting the train to Paris felt like a fast escape. I spent my time there completely alone. I brought with me a small recording setup and a guitar and wrote this song really late at night. I recorded a demo in the hotel bathroom—more reverb, and also less overheard by the next door rooms. The final song kept a lot of that energy in: muffled textures, like hearing a party through a wall.
3. “Am I Even Real?”
This started out as a slower-tempo, 3/4 time signature, acoustic guitar song. [Producer Fabian Prynn] and I had recorded that version and it was finished (we thought), but one day we decided to experiment and started to play it much faster and in 4/4. Suddenly, it jumped into life, and I remember laughing as we were playing, thinking, “Surely we won’t keep this after.” But we listened back (we recorded everything in our sessions together) and loved it. We actually kept so much from the first few times of playing it together. It felt so fun and lively, even though the lyrics come from an opposite place. You can hear all the mistakes, the vocals are out of time—one vocal layer isn’t even singing the right words at one point. The final song has kept a lot of the demo elements as the foundation of the track and we added more layers to it after.
4. “Two Chords”
As the name suggests, this song was built on top of two piano chords. I like to think of it as an endlessly ringing doorbell that I don’t care to answer. My favorite line is “The plants are dead (always forget).” I took a gardening course since this song was written. I’m hoping to change the fate of all my future house plants.
5. “Save As”
This is also quite an old song. It had been waiting around in my notes for a while. I kept coming back to the line “I thought that all the stars had burned through, but then there’s you.” I thought it might be the most romantic line I’d ever written. The song has the excitement and heaviness of feeling so much for someone, where paths keep meeting, always at the wrong time. It’s both joy and pain.
6. “Frozen Aisle”
The instrumental section in this song was an experiment that ended up being so beautiful. Hinako [Omori], Josephine [Stephensen], Ben [Reed], Jethro [Fox], and Fab all played their instruments to create the sound of melting. I always imagined a scene with this song, like something from a dream—standing by the freezers in a supermarket, basket in hand under that cold green light, and the whole place slowly filling up with water.
7. “Wasp”
I love how raw this song sounds; my scratchy guitar playing and Josephine creating a wasp through her cello.
8. “Language of Love”
Another song that doesn’t have a lot of layers or elements, but after the earthy sound of “Wasp,” it changes the scene and zooms way out to space for a moment. This is maybe the most direct love song I’ve written—one of deep, enduring love, and how it’s OK that it’s not always this neat thing (“Times we will drift to come back around”), but there’s a timelessness in meeting a soul that connects with yours.
9. “Healing (Slow)”
This is a song for my mother and grandmother. It was added to the record much later. I took a pause in the middle of making this album—maybe that was grief—and when I came back to it, I deleted a few songs and added a few. Everything felt different; some things felt less important and some had new meaning. This song has often felt difficult to play through the emotional weight of it. Some songs are like that: they never really get easier with time, just repeatedly transport me back to the memory very intensely. But the process of writing something out has always felt healing to me.
