LP - In The Water Vinyl
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On her third full-length TIDE/TIED, Montreal artist Thanya Iyer expands on the future-folk designs of sophomore album KIND with washes of jazz-inflected pop and ensemble ambience. While Iyer explored a more personal journey of self-love on KIND, she, her band, and cohort of guest musicians embark on a new way of moving on TIDE/TIED, prizing collective care and communal healing as antidotes to the dissonances of living in a colonial, capitalistic world.
Over twelve tracks, Iyer alternates song, synth layer, strings, and loop substance, interfixing with percussionist Daniel Gélinas’s meditative drumming and multi-instrumentalist Pompey’s adventurous arrangements. Through a deeply collaborative process, Gélinas and Pompey — themselves experienced producers — created the powerful and intricate worldscapes of TIDE/TIED, guided by Iyer’s incisive musical vision, all the while maintaining a cohesive, collective approach to the creative process.
TIDE/TIED opens with “I am here now,” a joyful, subdued celebration of reconnecting with your body, unraveling the challenges of staying present when the world is on fire. Iyer’s voice sublimates into passages that call on spiritual jazz, blurring the lines between ambient, folk, and pop with gorgeous stacks of alto sax, looped vocals, synth, and violin.
Future-folk machinations meld with syncopated pop on lead single “Low Tides,” building on previous efforts Pitchfork described as “a lucid daydream that’s constantly melting at its edges.” Although it’s a navigation of our lowest moments, Iyer’s band is brilliant on “Low Tides,” featuring live member Emilie Kahn, whose harp adds celestial revelry to the song’s restrained triumph over an intense trial.
Iyer’s signature post-genre pontifications are in full bloom on “What can we grow that we can’t see from here?” in which Iyer reminds us that the groundwork for new, radical futures can be laid by our own hands. Such prescient lessons are a prominent fixture of Iyer’s work — current and past — this time delivered with a thumping, controlled pop sensibility that says even when things feel stagnant and unclear, there is a way through.
This resilience is the key to TIDE/TIED, the fount from which its entire ethos springs forth. On the album’s cover art, a vivid illustration shows a massive tide approaching an Iyer ablaze, facing the world with her arms raised, ready to accept the crash of transformation.
