Working out of her Montreal home, and performing live with the Fanatics, Lizzy is a songwriter who marries pop grandeur with DIY sensibilities to produce songs as dreamy as they are authentic. Through a vivid blend of guitars and synths, not to mention an earnest vocal delivery, the music of Lizzy covers the gamut of emotions—from sadness to nostalgia to joy—and ultimately lives up to the name of her band. For deep in each song is a determination to find wonder and affirmation. “I’m a fanatic, because I know,” she sings on debut song ‘Magic’, released in 2015. “I still believe in magic, feel it in my bones.
After a number of releases in the interim, we’re delighted to share ‘Far Away’, the brand new single from Lizzy & the Fanatics. Opening with warm washes of synths, the track quickly sets out a sense of grandness, its sparkling pop sound possessing the depth and richness of an early nineties movie soundtrack.
Thematically, the track takes on the unreality of the online experience, drawing a line between the countless not-quite-lived moments of our time on the internet and the action of dreaming. For we can be free online, not quite ourselves or not ourselves at all, or even a hundred different selves all at once. As Lizzy sings: “A thousand dreams in the same night / a thousand versions of me in sight.”
However, ‘Far Away’ is not a celebration of this new reality. Because in this atomisation of the self, this flattening, something is lost. It might not be immediately obvious, or easily diagnosed, but a nagging feeling persists. For the internet can be less like a freedom and more like a retreat. A withdrawal from everything but the most superficial, transient contact.
