Sharing the rare ability to be simultaneously intimate and cinematic, this edition of LITM Singer-Songwriter Picks brings to you artists like Noctæra, Nata, and Luke Callahan, among others.
1. Noctæra – Legacy of Marble
French artist Noctæra’s Legacy of Marble feels like being transported across space and time, to somewhere that is both intimately familiar yet so beyond comprehension, it makes you feel small and fragile in its shadow. Noctæra’s haunting, ethereal vocals waft into your ears with confidence in their clarity; the heavy but minimal guitar, paired with the metronomic rhythm, allows the vocals to stand front and centre. Legacy of Marble sounds ancient, monumental, and contemplative in its restraint, grounding you in a space between reverence and uneasiness. Its each sound is measured and intentional, letting silences linger as much as its vocals, carving itself into your memory.
2. Nata – Wake Me Up
Nata mixes a bright airiness with haunting intensity on Wake Me Up, a track that stays in your body long after it ends. It sounds like a dreamlike freefall into synth-forward pop – ready to dance to in a room filled with pulsing lights. Meditative in its rise and fall, it’s trance-like in its electronic surreality. Nata aptly describes their music as “too weird to be pop, too pop to be weird”, and Wake Me Up is a perfect example of walking the line between pop and something more unpredictable: from its first measures, it marks itself down as a song that’ll leave you chasing it, instead of the other way round.
3. Luke Callahan – Islands in The Years
If you’ve ever connected hard and fast with someone you just met, and then lost touch with them immediately after, Islands in The Years will be a track that’ll wrestle its way into you, pulling those feelings back up. Luke Callahan sings of the small things you remember about someone after they’re gone, weaving a warm story that makes you lower your guard, one that makes you listen to it with complete attention. “We’re just islands in the years, close enough to touch, then gone in the tide,” his strong, open voice sings, with the light instrumentation giving it space to shine to its fullest. This track is one worth looping, and “until then, see you in the next strange place.”
4. The Amanda Emblem Experiment – Hanging Flute
The Amanda Emblem Experiment’s Hanging Flute carries all the allure, magnetism, and intrigue of the femme fatale character of your favourite heist film. It’s a track that knows how to grab and hold your attention – earthy and wooden in tone, it wraps itself in a retro-noir style of the 70s. From its very first notes, it immerses you in its mystery. Structured and layered with precision, it plays with tension – holding it effortlessly, and releasing it with absolute control. The flute floats and flourishes above everything else, its trills imbuing the track with a buoyant, playful suspense. Like a perfectly staged getaway, the song leaves you breathless, waiting for what comes next.
5. Moira Chicilo – Carry Them With Me
Carry Them With Me is immediately heart-stirring, the kind of track that makes you pause what you’re doing to feel it completely. Moira Chicilo has perfectly distilled into music the feeling of living in a beautiful moment, while simultaneously knowing that that moment will end soon, leaving you with a hole in your chest. Carry Them With Me is mature, meaningful, and introspective with its strong vocals and acoustic instrumentation, yet it shines with an iridescence and the whimsy of youth. Despite its warmth and comfort, it’s biting in its bittersweetness; still, its melancholia never falls into anguish. Chicilo plays the balancing act to perfection, and this is a track I’ll be carrying with me for a while.
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