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- June 4, 2022
ANNIE HAMILTON’S NEW LP SAYS, ‘THE FUTURE IS HERE BUT IT FEELS KINDA LIKE THE PAST’ AND SAME TBH
Let’s be honest we lived through some crazy historical moments in the short span of just a couple of years. None of us would have pictured our future to turn out to be the way it is now. But don’t you still get this eerie feeling that the future is here but it feels kinda like the past, history repeating itself and we are just floating in the middle of the chaos trying to survive.
Sydney-based musician, visual artist, and designer Annie Hamilton gets you and she’s here to perfectly capture this feeling with her long-awaited debut album, the future is here but it feels kinda like the past. A heft and long title but sometimes you just straight up gotta say how it is. This directness and fearlessness of speaking out about the big challenges in life are what makes Annie’s LP such a wholesome masterpiece.
The 11-track album comes with uniquely crafted music videos to accompany the listening experience and enables you to fully emerge into the essence of the tune. A complete sensory experience tinged in dark haze hues from blue to red. The visualizers are so gloomy and so serene that it’s giving me the shivers, the good kind ofc.
The Aussie singer is obsessed with memory, dream worlds, fantasies, and parallel realities (same girl). But in her case, the fantastic daydreams developed into something more: Inspired by her dreams and the stunning natural landscapes of her home country the future is here but it feels kinda like the past is born. The synthetic yet raw, polished yet organic, soft beats take you on a mystical journey that traces the curves of the musician’s beautiful mind and gives way to her deepest self.
“It’s about the passing of time, how sometimes it flies by and sometimes it drags on forever and we’re always looking ahead wanting something more or wallowing in nostalgia, stuck in a past that probably wasn’t as good at the time as we remember it… the sense that the grass is always greener. The sense that there is never enough time to do everything that we want to do, or the feeling that we should have done more with the time that has already passed.”
Annie Hamilton
A dramatic b&w old school cinematic opening sets the mood for “Whirlwind”. Although soft and airy to the ears, when listened closely the mystifying lyrics stir up quite the whirlwind of emotions. Annie is the personified wind (or sun, I’m up to discuss the interpretation with you guys) to reach out to her object of desire. A song about deep longing and the frustration with physicality and distance. If you’ve ever been through a long-distance relationship, then this tune will definitely strike a nerve with you.
The album lives in these listless hours of liminal consciousness, a self-contained, through-the-looking-glass universe where time becomes elastic, memories blur imperceptibly into one another, and seeds of deep emotional truth come to you in surreal, warped imagery. This one hits deep in the feels, so be ready to face your own twilight thoughts guided by Annie’s soft voice.
“Electric Night” is serving peak ‘Coyote Ugly’, pop-grunge vibes and I’m here for it! The music video has that grainy resolution, messy waves, and the kick-ass lead singer wielding a guitar, basically, everything little me thought was the height of aesthetic back in the day. Besides dishing up on the nostalgia and cool-girl vibes, “Electric Night” is a love song dedicated to nighttime memories.
Annie Hamilton teamed up with Jenny McCullagh , Rosie Fitzgerald (I Know Leopard), Matt Mason (DMA’s), and Luke Davison (The Preatures), to create the ensemble of emotionally charged songs that make up the future is here but it feels kinda like the past.
By rejecting the straight-forward narrative structure in favor of pinning down hyper-specific yet universally empathetic moments, the future is here but it feels kinda like the past is a grainy collage of snapshots that spans the collective memories of each one of us. We can find ourselves between the lines of the lyrics and feel the echoes of the past resonance in every beat. It makes us realize that we are all just stumbling through life and trying to make some kind of beautiful, fleeting sense of it.
Tell me what you think about the future is here but it feels kinda like the past and let’s ponder about the lyrics in the comments below!
