Stream: Drinker, ‘Stay’

Kevin Bronson on May 20th, 2020

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There’s a lot of miles in the cross-country collaboration between singer-songwriter Aaron Mendelsohn (L.A.) and producer-composer Ariel Loh (New York), known as Drinker. And, as it turns out, a lot of musical mileage.

After debuting in 2017 with the EP “Happy Accident,” the duo last year released their appropriately titled full-length “Fragments,” an album that comes in like the fog in the Carl Sandburg poem but, with its minimal production approach and mix of organic and electronic instrumentation, makes a maximum impact. Sonically and conceptually, it’s psychedelic like lace is psychedelic.

Drinker are back at work this year on a new EP, “They Don’t Want to Know,” out June 19 via B3SCI Records.

They introduced the EP last month with the single “Even If I Know,” a song with a light frosting of trip-hop fairy dust. And today they unveiled the new single “Stay,” a heartbeat of a song that invites permanence in the face of a world in chaos.

The song came together, Mendelsohn says, on a visit to New York last December. “We revisited an old verse — a melody we both loved — that had never found its chorus,” he says. “Playing it on Ariel’s Wurlitzer I got through the verse and as I kept playing, the chords to the next section just found themselves in that moment. The lyric, which starts ‘keep disorder / stay off in your corner’ felt like maybe it was too cerebral of an idea for a song. I was feeling unsure about pushing as far in that direction as my mind had wanted to take it, but began to feel a sense of balance taking hold as the simple statement ‘I wanna stay’ seemed to ground the song while embracing all the chaos and struggle laid out in the verses.”

||| Stream: “Stay”