Song Premiere: Manuka

The most evocative kinda music always stokes visions and vibes. Certain tones and modulations, perfect notes and curled melodies, they coalesce to conjure an image or a place in my head upon the closing of my eyes, and I can feel, or at least I think I feel..., the temperature of the room shift.



Such is the case with Manuka's new one "Stuck..." And I can't have picked a better image to go with the tiding waves and seafoam splay of the guitars, the breezy rhythms, and the tenderly breathed billowing of the vocals over the pulsing percussion. Just the three of them caught in a candid, fleeting moment at a coastline, as silhouettes against the sun just as that orange orb is getting to descend. It's where the tide hits the sand, where elements merge.

The reverb wrapping around the soundscape of "Stuck" aurally simulates the way that photograph's haziness seems to make the sky an indeterminate blend of gray-ish blues blurring around the sun. Like seminal dreampop pioneers the Coctaeu Twins, or the more paisley psychedelic lullabies of the Velvet Underground, Manuka's lead single off their forthcoming album, Beach Life, is a mood-massage, subtly, evenly building into a geyser of harmonies and guitars looping over tails upon tails of memseric delay effects...

The group is currently wrapping up Beach Life for a release date yet to be determined. But there's also going to be a music video for this song on the horizon.

Meanwhile, check out Manuka here, and follow here.