With album Staying Mellow Blows out this August via Vain Mina Records and Tin Angel Records, Toronto-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Eliza Niemi has unveiled brand new single ‘Walking Feels Slow’ to show off a style honed through years of collaboration and connection. As part of the Halifax music scene, Niemi has worked with the likes of New Love Underground and Mauno, as well as supporting acts such as Le Ren, Quaker Parents and Evan J. Cartwright, and each partnership went some way to shaping what was to come.
Not least the simple power of working together. Staying Mellow Blues is itself a collaborative affair, with a diverse supporting cast including Maryam Said, Cedric Noel, Eli Kaufman and Yolande Laroche. The result feels like witnessing one person’s singular vision expanded into something beyond their own powers to create. The result is a style still full of personality and idiosyncrasy, a style still inherently theirs, indeed one perhaps more theirs than would be possible had Niemi been working alone.
‘Walking Feels Slow’ is a prime example of such a sound. A track caught between two streams of living, the slow zoomed in and the rapid zoomed out, tapping into the friction between these states to create a humming vibration. “I wanted to evoke the feeling of desperately trying to stay present,” Niemi explains. “The little games we play with ourselves and mantras we repeat to prevent us from projecting or worrying about the past or future.” The aim led toward a kind of mindfulness, though not one emptied of contents as one might imagine, but instead producing its own kind of energy. “There’s a manic energy in trying to slow down and enjoy each bite as if it’s the whole fruit—a sort of buzzing at a high frequency—that I wanted to embody and convey in this track.”
Check out the video filmed and directed by Ali Vanderkruyk below:
Staying Mellow Blues is out on the 5th August via Vain Mina Records and Tin Angel Records and you can pre-order it now.
