by Anna Solomon (@chateau.fiasco)
On her forthcoming debut, Attachment Figure, Sarah Morrison aims to capture the unease of hearing the score of a horror film. She’s previously toured as the keyboardist for Locate S,1, and is now working alongside producers and fellow Locate S,1 members Ross Brand and Clayton Rychlik, who have also played in Of Montreal. Attachment Figure is due out October 13th via Ramp Local.
“Gray Apples” is immediately notable for how its palette feels simultaneously gloomy and 80s. It has the bright synths and electric piano, underscored by a moving bass line and four on the floor electronic kick. But there’s nothing joyful about it, certainly not at first. Morrison describes walking through a graveyard, looking for a spirit or some sense of understanding, but instead she fixates on dead fruit and the names on the gravestones. As the song progresses, new synth melodies and patches recreate the atmosphere of faint glowing streetlights or the hum of bugs. Morrison’s eerie vocal shines the most when the rhythm section cuts out and she uses a more dramatic vibrato over eerie chords. The drums escalate in the final stretch, just enough to support the support the major chord turn and send the song off on a note that’s a bit more hopeful, although no less unsettling.
Speaking about the song, Morrison shared:
“I wrote this during a week I had off between jobs in October 2021. I spent a lot of that time walking and thinking about employment, purpose, inadequacy…and as my walks took me to cemeteries it finally sort of occurred to me I was having these very mortal thoughts while sometimes standing on someone’s grave. The song started as an effort to figure out what wisdom a person learns through the experience of death, but ends up reckoning with what’s probably true, that it’s a whole lot of confusion and rot above as well as below the veil of life and death."