“Halfway through 2019, having just finished our touring cycle for Shadowboxer, we came to Sydney and settled back into some sort of normal routine. We began sketches for the next batch of music, sending ideas back and forth, searching for a common thread. Eventually we decided to get outta the city and head down to the south coast of Sydney for a writing trip. It was there we wrote the first iteration of MORE.
“We had set up the living room of an Airbnb and played music together from morning till night. MORE arrived on the final day and began as a concept about a character completely delusional with their desire for more. We started playing around in new time signatures trying to figure out where it fit best, eventually landing on 5/4 which has this feeling of never really resolving and always feeling tense. We left the cabin with the music and later that week went into the studio to write the melody. I spent the summer of 2019/20, refining and jotting down provocative phrases that linked to the topic, as I did I began to connect deeper with this feeling, resonating with this desire in me for more, competing with others, and repeating the cycle of buying useless shit to make me happy. It was such a fun song to write, collecting modern day problems and putting them into the song. It’s part tongue-in-cheek but was a real awakening in seeing myself in that character.
“Over 2020 we continued to build on all the other sketches written in that cabin collaborating with Jon Gilmore over email. Fortunately we had a lot of experience writing via the internet and were able to finish the bulk of the music whilst the world remained in lock down. MORE set the theme of the record to come, learning to be okay with what we have and finding meaning in the monotony.”
Mansionair released their debut album Shadowboxer in March 2019. A triple j feature album, Shadowboxer was written and self-produced by the band, the culmination of a journey that started with a viral hit single and led to high profile collaborations, including a Grammy-nomination for their single with Odesza in ‘Line of Sight’, gold ARIA-accredited tracks in ‘Easier’ and ‘Astronaut (Something About Your Love)’, Billboard charting singles and over 220 million streams across DSPs.
Their most recent, stand-alone single ‘Guillotine’ – a collaboration with US artist NoMBe – was released at the tail end of 2020 and picked up spins from triple j locally along with Alt Nation and SiriusXM in the US. Added to an impressive array of playlists across both Apple Music and Spotify, it showed off a dynamic new side to the band.
‘MORE’ continues that trajectory and hints at further exciting things to come.
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