You'd be forgiven for thinking that THE XX had released some new music for our listening pleasure. 'Saturn Boy' could have easily been birthed out of the dark studios of the wistful Londoners, but it wasn't.
This is DREAM KOALA, the young Brazilian/Parisian one-man-show crafting the kind of forlorn, lonely pieces of sound to perfectly compliment those microwave dinners for one. In 'Saturn Boy', Yndi Ferreira (no relation to Sky) wails about homesick loneliness and being scared "to think of tomorrow- the future, what's waiting for us; and if there is a God in the universe".
His upcoming EP is titled 'Earth. Home. Destroyed', and a quote on his Soundcloud page reads: "The storyline paints a future where all the animals disappeared from Earth, where the oceans are devouring the continents and where the harmony of nature was broken by humans".
It's some pretty heavy shit for a nineteen-year-old to be grappling with, and the anxious existentialism rings out off the edge of his frail falsettos, echoing through the dark spaces of this track's instrumentation. It's sparse and dimly lit, like THE XX's 'Angels': resonant guitar riffs and distant percussive knocks colouring things in a decided shade of blue. Like 'Angels', however, it's also pretty dreamy: gracefully delicate; melancholic in a tender and human way. DREAM KOALA takes a sound that is at once distant, "far from home, galaxies away", and makes it chillingly intimate.
This comes off as something like bedroom electronica in that way: one can almost picture Ferreira crouched on a single mattress in a dark hotel room—the only light flickering from his laptop screen and Ableton launchpad; the only sound his frail longings and his ambient, lo-fi drum samples. It's a kind of gloomy aesthetic that walks the line between cathartic introspection and overbearing self-loathing—but DREAM KOALA keeps things soothing in this fragile gem from an upcoming talent.
Words by Gavin Butler
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LISTEN: DREAM KOALA 'IRON' (WOODKID COVER)
