We’ve written about several singles from Michael Rea’s Symbol Soup in recent months, first ‘Overdressed‘ and its introduction to a sound that “‘fuses a classic British folk charm with something rather more American, including faint notes of country and a couple of spoonfuls of Alex G-style lo-fi indie rock,” and more recently ‘Airglow‘, which blended bedroom pop and psych-inflected folk. A song which managed to “evoke the slow hours of a summer afternoon without sanding down the snags and edges beneath the surface,” as we put it, exploring the internet age with a distinctive laidback charm. Both singles presented a style able to explore the nuanced blend of joys and anxieties that make up a young life spent in the sunny British clime.
The Symbol Soup project was merely gearing up, and the Milton Keynes-born, London-based artist has now unveiled his debut album Slow Puncture with Sad Club Records. It’s a release which explores Rea’s childhood with the above duality in mind, where brightness is always counterbalanced by disappointment or unease. “A tyre with a slow puncture needs constant effort and maintenance just to keep moving, but usually doesn’t get repaired or replaced until it’s too late,” Rea explains. “A running theme of the album is living with our own limitations or flaws—ideally through acceptance, other times through pure laziness. The metaphor also relates to the process of growing older, feeling that you’re imperceptibly losing something as time passes.”
Latest single ‘Appetite’ processes these ideas through our strange relationship with desires and expectations. Where the urge to live an exciting life is always present, yet some dissatisfaction sits at the edge of every experience. As though, having grown up in front of the television, real-life can’t quite match up. “Thematically it’s about feeling totally overwhelmed and totally underwhelmed at the same time” Rea says of the single. “Being endlessly greedy for more excitement and experiences, then when things come to fruition turning straight to anxiety and being unable to savour them. Being ‘seasick’, out in a vast ocean but confined to your own nausea.”
Never carried
On the crest of any wave
You got seasick
Blood drained from your face
With a shot of salty water in its place
Slow Puncture is out on the 21st July via Sad Club Records and you can pre-order it now.
