Autumn Luz documents the Pang of long-distance longing in her new single and video — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
The lead single from the Philadelphia singer-songwriter’s debut EP Fragments, Pang opens as almost a gothic a cappella piece with looped layered vocal samples from Autumn’s actual demo. The song slinks forward with a bluesy ostinato and then segues into a whimsical jazzy-pop passage before locking back into the song’s hypnotic groove.
Pang musically describes the development, sensations, and symptoms of an intense and unfulfilled romantic desire, from its fun emergence to the vulnerability of emotional intimacy. Raw, dark, sensual, heavy, intense, imperfect, soulful, painful, on an arc from light and fun, to serious, raging, all-out rock. “When I started writing Pang, I had an intense crush happening over a very long distance, magnifying the longing,” Luz says. “The pang of a crush, became the pang of lust, which became the pang of the scary realization that we were attached, in love, and vulnerable to one another’s actions.”
Luz knew the title of her debut EP and the darkly cathartic, five-song collection’s thematic bend before she knew what songs would comprise it. The EP would be culled from a sprawling 30-40 song catalog that explored the shadowy emotions that continue to haunt childhood trauma survivors well into adulthood, and shape their experiences in future relationships.
“These are sharp little pieces of my fragmented sense of self as a complex trauma survivor,” she shares. “Each song describes just one element of one of the wildest years of my life, connecting with parts of myself I had ignored for decades, and setting myself free.”
Luz’s noir-ish songwriting blurs lines between jazz, rock, pop, R&B, indie rock, and folk, inhabiting a world where Fiona Apple and Portishead had a baby. She fearlessly follows her heart and her ear to unusual chords, rhythms, and structures, and then gratefully lets her compositions blossom through her collaborators. Fragments features musical contributions from literally around the world, including co-producer, co-writer and multi-instrumentalist Samwe.
Watch the video for Pang above, hear more from Autumn Luz below, and catch up with her on her website, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
