It’s been a few quiet years from the globe-dwelling musician, following the release in 2022 of her staggering debut album All Things Heavy. If you’ve not yet heard it on the internet waves, go do yourself a favour. I think of it more as an autumn listen, with its heartrending melancholy and hazy atmosphere, precision-made for foggy evenings and candlelight, but do sorrow and hope ever really need a perfect season?
It was in autumn 2022 that I saw her live for the first and so far only time, in Berlin, just a month before the album was out, and she caught me at a moment when all things did feel heavy and muggy and confused and I was following music like a moth chasing a flame, hoping it will save me (it did). Now her latest single ‘Run Like Hell’ captures Mynolia in a whole new chapter of and outlook on life. The dreaminess is still there, but the scope is far expanded.
‘Run Like Hell’ is a marching challenger, a call out and cornering of the power snatchers, the order takers, the lethargists and rebels and how all those archetypes exist inside all of us. Upon zooming out as far as I can manage, I see how time, the world and life continues to unfold/exist/expand despite our personal and even collective experiences.
Tinged with nostalgia, the soundscape blends the grounded folk nature of Mynolia‘s voice with woodland-like percussion and electronic swells putting one in mind of 70s synth experimentation – unsurprising, as the piece is co-produced with Rich Ruth, an incredible cosmic jazz musician in his own right (check out his latest album Water Still Flows), adding his own ghostly effects, not in the scary way, more in the intangible edge-of-vision corner-of-the-eye unsettling. Taylor Wafford of Blood Root also lends her harmonising vocals for a furious final chorus, loudly proclaiming itself and so fitting to the overall theme.
It’s been cooking for a while, and while things take time to be nurtured and pruned and stewed over and tied up with string, this release is a big relief for me and even more so, deeply exciting because it’s being accompanied by some really great news.
Mynolia has been signed on to the UK record label Full Time Hobby and I can only assume an announcement for her highly-anticipated second album is imminent.
Paired with this soaring new piece is a music video directed by Johney Birrell (with additional creative direction from Dylan Handley) and shot in and around Mynolia’s new home of Nashville, TN. The reverse vocals mirror the reverse camera shots, moving back in time, is she climbing up or down reversed? From the river to the meadow to under highway pillars, the imagery moves from the boxed in to the limitless outdoors, united by her dancing and the myriad little things held gently in her hands, from a shining egg to beautifully sculpted sleeping heads. It all speaks to the intimacy of the music, the depth of feeling it sprung from and the great privilege of watching an artist truly fulfil their vision in such wonderful collaboration.
Stream ‘Run Like Hell‘ wherever you listen to music.
All quotes are from Mynolia’s Pepper Zine on Substack (subscribe HERE).