Kevin Bronson on February 5th, 2021

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Rounding up three notable singles that came out this week — a Zella Day/Weyes Blood collaboration, and new sounds from Finneas and Mating Ritual:

ZELLA DAY, “Holocene” (feat. Weyes Blood)

Zella Day returned last summer with her first release in five years, the Dan Auerbach-produced EP “Where Does the Devil Hide.” Here, she teams up with Natalie Mering, aka Weyes Blood, on a serenely beautiful song that sounds like it was just unearthed from a ’60s Laurel Canyon time capsule. “Over the last year I have found myself living in two conflicted mental states,” Day writes on social media. “Days where I’m impassioned, so many words and thoughts surrounding our current climate extending throughout my being that it feels like a fire is burning in my skull. Hope flashes in the distance of a darkness unparalleled to anything I’ve experienced in my own lifetime, maybe there is a song in that flash of hope if I can catch it in time. The other reality is emptiness, a complete loss for words. Exhaustion. Loneliness. Sometimes loneliness becomes a giant casting a long shadow that I can’t outrun, I forget what the sun looks like and so I forget the sun. I learned not to be too hard on myself in these moments, ultimately trusting that the motivation to create would eventually come back to me. ‘Holocene’ was the rain that fell. It’s a collection of thoughts, micro and macro, a song for the interpersonal relationship between the world inside and outside of ourselves. A ‘we are everything and nothing at all’ mantra.”

FINNEAS, “American Cliché

Finneas kicks off the new year with the upbeat, theatrical song that has been a fan favorite in his live sets, joking on Twitter that his followers bullied him into finishing it.

MATING RITUAL, “Tell Me You Don’t Love Me”

As advertised last week when they released the video for the title track to their 2020 album “The Bungalow,” Mating Ritual have embarked on releasing a series of monthly singles. Brothers Ryan Marshall Lawhon and Taylor Lawhon dive into the world of glistening ’80s-style ballads. For breakups after a night on the dancefloor … or getting dumped on Valentine’s Day.