Ev. G is not just dropping a track, he's providing an opening. The pop siren's debut album, "And Then I Go Up," arrives in full on September, but the twinkling pop grenade "Way We Remember" offers a good taste of his liquid colors. It's lapping in a vaporwave haze, swirling with disorientation, and it perfectly encapsulates the ephemeral state of memory, bending adrift in your head, shifting like so much sand underfoot.
If it's possible for a record to feel like entering the middle of a dream when you've missed some early act tidbits, "Way We Remember" has an air of that sensation from its start. The accompanying soundscape, envisioned first by longtime collaborator and producer Brock Geiger, existed as a beatless plane shrouded in warbling synth textures, rooted in churning guitars with staggering pitch shifts. The original instrumental, titled "Way We Remember," would ultimately become just that for the complete song.
Ev. Which is where G's aptitude came into play, using it to their advantage on a fractious nocturne that shifts like liquid light. The track ripples with a hallucinatory confidence, formed from off-kilter rhythms and warped psychedelic edges that pull at your senses. Sung vocals ebb and flow in the haze rather than narrating over it.
Some of that magic might be due to where the song was born. We worked on this one in a few spots. There are a few key spots for the most part in the record. There was something about that place that allowed us to go deeper into the trippy spaces we were trying to hit with the music. It is an environment that you can almost feel enshrouded in, with the recording of the woodsmoke warmth and the stillness of the water, a way of being cut off from ordinary time. G continues, but one of the big ones was this log cabin studio on a lake in northern Ontario, Brett Pederson's Tall Pines. That setting cracked the song open.
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