Icelandic duo – BSÍ – are back with the new release: ‘Relax, blabla’; which comprises two contrasting and compelling new tracks: “Jelly Belly” and “New Moon”.
With soft and gauzy atmospherics countered by anxiety-inducing sprawls of melodic mastery, ‘Relax, blabla’ is another paradoxical release that comes in two parts. Arriving just in time for the heady nostalgia of a sun-baked summer, the two-sided release consists of two enticing new tracks: one bristling and upbeat, and the other more supine and slowed.
Recorded and mixed by Árni Hjörvar (The Vaccines), the first and fastest of the two new cuts, “Jelly Belly”, plays out like a heartwarming group therapy session, with past pains and trudged up traumas meeting a 157 bpm outburst of agitation and infectious joy. With a sense of urgency driven by a fast-paced guitar line that threatens to run away with itself, overflowing background chatter mixed with injections of fuzzy feedback and a lucid approach to vocal delivery, the track evokes the intense bodily sensation that is triggered by deep-rooted and unshakeable memories of toxic relationships.
With playful rhythms masking a more sombre subject matter, the track comes complete with a prismatic official music video created by Icelandic filmmaker and TV director Ugla Hauksdóttir (The Power, Hanna, Snowfall, Trapped). Touching on the numbness that comes with covering up your own feelings in shame and the heavy burden of grappling with rigid gender roles and unhealthy peer pressure, the video sees its mishmash of characters search for, find and reinvent themselves in a warped wallpaper utopia.
Also reaching to the past to touch on painful memories, the release’s second, slower cut “New Moon” is more atmospheric and airy: boasting the duo’s genre-hopping breadth as soft acoustic guitar twangs meddle with almost whispered vocals and a sparse landscape of instrumentals that seem to fade away into nothingness.
Reflecting on memories of an estranged and isolated youth — and the feeling of being “the only blue-haired person in a schoolyard full of blondes” — the track is tinted with adolescent nostalgia as its whispered melodies drift by like a lone tumbleweed in a desolate stretch of desert.
Both “Jelly Belly” and “New Moon” are available together as the split AA-single: ‘Relax, blabla’ NOW.