Teen Daze

After last year's mellow pop album, Elegant Rhythms, Teen Daze returns to a more familiar sound. In a way. The soft guitars and gentle Rhodes of Elegant Rhythms have been replaced by pulsing synths and blasted-out 808s, something somewhat more familiar to listeners that have been following Teen Daze's career since 2010.

The first sounds we hear on Moving forward are a gentle breeze of voices and pads, a calm before the storm, before we're thrown into this new world. The voices, like a choir of robots, position Teen Daze as an artist who's contemplating the past, while keeping his eyes on the future. You hear it in the arrangement: melodic, atmospheric, emotional, all signs of a Teen Daze production, while also feeling very 'of the times'. What does it mean to be an artist 14 years into their career? We can hear this thought being processed in both the lyrics, and the sound of the song.

The B-side is one of Teen Daze's dreamiest pop songs to date: an ode to his favourite city in the world, Tokyo. You can almost see the cherry blossoms gently falling as the first sounds enter. And almost as quickly as those images enter, we're thrown into the singular energy that is Tokyo At Night. The chorus brings a moment of contemplation: "It's strange to be so far away, and I can't help myself from wanting to stay." This track captures that fleeting feeling of being somewhere you love, and knowing that you also can't stay.