Music / Premieres
Premiere:
HYG - Into The New World
HYG - Into The New World
Back with their first new music in two years, Canberra psychedelic rockers HYG have returned with ‘Into The New World’, an adventurous and intoxicating sonic journey that hints at where the four-piece’s burgeoning sound may be headed next.
The last time we heard from Canberra outfit HYG was alongside the release of their 2020 single ‘Be Here’. ‘Be Here’ was a bit of an outlier to HYG’s previous music - trading out their usual psychedelic tendencies for a sturdier post-punk backbone, while still paying tribute to the weirder factors of their sound with an off-kilter time signature and a foreboding, constantly evolving energy. But now two years on, the group seem to have come full circle, returning to their psychedelic origins with more confidence and imagination that before as they treat us to the kaleidoscopic ‘Into The New World’.
Built around a never-ending groove, ‘Into The New World’ takes shape slowly and steadily, led by an cyclical bassline that expands outwards into a tangle of soaring guitar lines and glowing keys, unpinned by a restless yet dependable backbeat. With the group forgoing vocals altogether, you might expect things to get monotonous quickly but that’s far from the case; as ‘Into The New World’ unravels we’re quickly hypnotised by the meditative layers, but with so many unexpected twists and turns the track feels truly transportive, refracting the sounds heard at the beginning to take us somewhere else entirely by its conclusion.
It’s a winning example of a band being able to conjure a narrative without the need of words, the evocative instrumentation coaxing us into a haze that feels equally disorientating yet assured. Speaking about the track, the band’s Mark Wilson tell us “with the bushfires and floods and then COVID, all within the first few months of 2020, it was clear that we had reached the tipping point everyone had been talking about for the past few decades – everything had changed and there was no going back to how things were. So the choice now is to either let yourself get overwhelmed by this fact and just let the world win over you, or accept that this is how things are and learn how to live with things as they are now. That’s where we were at going into these recordings; not totally on top of things yet but trying to figure out our place among the world, and trying not to get lost in that but taking the lead in that process.”
Built around a never-ending groove, ‘Into The New World’ takes shape slowly and steadily, led by an cyclical bassline that expands outwards into a tangle of soaring guitar lines and glowing keys, unpinned by a restless yet dependable backbeat. With the group forgoing vocals altogether, you might expect things to get monotonous quickly but that’s far from the case; as ‘Into The New World’ unravels we’re quickly hypnotised by the meditative layers, but with so many unexpected twists and turns the track feels truly transportive, refracting the sounds heard at the beginning to take us somewhere else entirely by its conclusion.
It’s a winning example of a band being able to conjure a narrative without the need of words, the evocative instrumentation coaxing us into a haze that feels equally disorientating yet assured. Speaking about the track, the band’s Mark Wilson tell us “with the bushfires and floods and then COVID, all within the first few months of 2020, it was clear that we had reached the tipping point everyone had been talking about for the past few decades – everything had changed and there was no going back to how things were. So the choice now is to either let yourself get overwhelmed by this fact and just let the world win over you, or accept that this is how things are and learn how to live with things as they are now. That’s where we were at going into these recordings; not totally on top of things yet but trying to figure out our place among the world, and trying not to get lost in that but taking the lead in that process.”
'Into The New World' is out today in all the usual places.
