Brooklyn’s brand new dreampop band UNI IKA AI – comprised of Maia Friedman, Pete Lalish, Tom Deis, and Dan Drohan – is revving up to release their debut album, lengthly titled Keeping A Golden Bullseye In The Corner of My Mind. Today, Impose has the exclusive premiere of their new single “Mexico”.
Maia’s vocals. Oh my goodness, Maia’s vocals. Sure, the instrumentals are woven in such a way that you feel like you’re floating on a cloud in a layered, textured dream that you don’t necessarily want to wake up from. The composition is absolutely exquisite. But we hadn’t heard proper “dreampop” until we heard Maia’s voice. The way it travels seamlessly over each note, the way the reverb highlights the angelic quality of it all. We just can’t get enough.
Maia had quite a bit to say about the track itself.
“Mexico” was one of those songs that sort of appeared out of thin air. Pete and I were improvising together – I was playing around for the first time on a new synthesizer and this one particular sound stood out to me. The chords and melody and words all sort of fell out of my mouth and into place without much thought. I’m not prone to writing devotional love-songs, so at first I thought these words would be placeholders for new ones to come later, but the more I thought about the song, the more it began to take on new meaning and significance.
In the midst of writing the song I remembered a story I read in the news 10 or so years ago. It was a story about an astronaut who was arrested after driving over 900 miles, allegedly wearing an adult diaper, for the attempted kidnapping of a romantic rival. I don’t know why but I started making a loose connection between the twisting, emotional path of that story and this song. The themes of loneliness, obsession, and floating in the darkness of outer space began to emerge and the lyrics started to show their own unique meaning.
The mental and emotional tribulations of romantic love can be a lot to handle, and to imagine the strength and steadfastness it must take to venture out of this world, to be so far from the ones you love back on earth – it must be a very unique experience that pushes the limits to the extreme.
Keeping A Golden Bullseye In The Corner of My Mind is out October 14th. It is available for preorder now.
