Aunty Social is the music project that Toronto-based musician Daniela Gitto uses as a force to dismantle bad habits and interfering insecurities. With her second EP It Looks Friendly, the 24-year-old pop musician is asking more questions of herself to crystalize a deeper worldview, and the whirling synth-pop single “Unsmiling” is our first look at it.
On “Unsmiling,” Aunty Social contemplates how passion and commitment overlap, sometimes fatally colliding. “Knowing I could be the one / To give you everything / Is the issue,” she sings, her voice heavy with pained desire. Gitto explains that “Unsmiling” involves two people in a “relationship fueled by passion and killed by emotional instability.” She continues, “The conflict between feeling intensely and their impulsive ways of expressing it creates an addiction to excitement and unpredictability. Deep down, they both want a chance at domesticity and regularity but it is impossible because their relationship was already built from its inevitable destruction.”
The single was put together across three different bedrooms with Gitto and her producer Sam Arion. “It was concepted in my childhood bedroom then moved into an East London flat and eventually settled in Sam Arion’s basement. I think the casual environment had a lot to do with this songs whimsical, and unreserved nature,” she says.
Check out the track below.
