VIDEO: ginla Share New Single and Video 'You' Off Upcoming LP

Toronto/Brooklyn duo ginla have shared a new single and video today called "You" off their upcoming sophomore LP Everything.

"'You' is about how easy it is to get lost in the fast pace of everyday life, chasing the future and holding on to the past," says ginla's Joe Manzoli. "Written in the summer of 2019, during a period where I was constantly hopping back and forth between Toronto and New York every month, I couldn't help but notice how difficult it is at times to remember yourself, and who you are."

ginla will release their sophomore LP Everything on March 25th, 2022 on their newly founded label No Content.

ginla's music floats enigmatically in the space between sleep and waking life. Like a car speeding down an empty highway at dusk, the band's songs carry an otherworldly momentum. And yet, the obliquely existential lyrics, and lush soundscapes, seem to float languidly through the listener's mind, like the waking dream of a dozing passenger, who, slumped against the car window, is vaguely aware of the foggy shapes speeding by, familiar yet alien.

After completing most of the record together in Brooklyn just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joe Manzoli and Jon Nellen had to work creatively to finish the rest remotely, as they were marooned from one another on opposite sides of the US-Canada border. With the mixing assistance of Rusty Santos (Animal Collective, Panda Bear), this unusual production process would generate ginla's most captivating release to date.

The songs on Everything speak in tongues, simultaneously reaching both the conscious and unconscious minds of the listener. Contrasting feelings seem to blur together, as past, present, and future merge into an eternal now. The music feels intimate, yet mysterious, a gorgeous statement on the often baffling experience of simply being a mind, alive in the world.

The album opens with "Bloodstream." Gentle acoustic strums cushion a hypnotic piano, as the lyrics patiently unfurl a kind of manifesto for the band "It's a weight that I can carry, thoughts rolling in my head, trees growing faster barely shade me. I'm too high up to contain...and I'll do it all for you." Towards the end of the track, the emotion that's been simmering underneath the song bursts through with a soaring guitar solo, evoking the feeling of sudden weightlessness, as if the listener is levitating high above the world, watching the human drama unfold cinematically below.

The band's second single, Carousel, features Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief as a guest vocalist, singing in a gentle unison with Nellen's calming baritone. The feeling of a dream-like highway-to-nowhere pervades Carousel, as Lenker and Nellen sing, "Blue skies drape the silver van I drive down 85 but I'm lost again" over shimmering acoustic fingerpicking and otherworldly background vocals that swirl like mists above the highway.

"You", a 90's-esque strummer (think lighter Smashing Pumpkins, or the less sardonic side of Pavement) finds Manzoli on lead vocals. It's a meditation on the meaning of the self in a transient world. "You only have a finite memory, so you pick and choose the things you hold onto, will it be you?" sings Manzoli, in a whispery tenor.

"Decider" is a sprawling, elliptical epic, built around an extended improvisation between Manzoli and Nellen on guitar and piano, and featuring cryptic wordplay. The guitar and piano dance around each other in an elegant and free-flowing ballet while synthesizer arpeggios keep time, a ghostly conductor drifting around amidst the interplay.

At the heart of Everything, there is a deep need to see boundaries dissolve: the boundary between wakefulness and sleep, between the future and the past, between the self and the other. Like a zen koan, the album offers us a hint that, behind the curtain of the familiar, we will always find the incomprehensible. The message is simple. To understand your place in the world, you must look inward. Only then will you see yourself unravel, revealing that underneath it all, awaits Everything.

Watch the new music video here:

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