IDER, the duo of Megan Marwick and Lily Somerville, are making a sneaky return with their first new music since their excellent debut album Emotional Education. Over the weekend they released “Saturday,” – unusual not just for its day of release, but for the heavy, downcast tone of the song, practically the opposite of what we’ve come to know them for. They say:
“We wrote and produced ‘Saturday,’ in our flat whilst we were living in Berlin during lockdown in April. We both got pretty sick with the virus and the song was written when we were feverish and almost hallucinating. We turned Megan’s cough into the kick drum and sampled some other stuff from around the flat we were staying in at the time. We wanted to capture the surreal couple of weeks we were having. This also fed into the idea behind the video – the two of us in a warped, eerie environment, reflective of the world feeling trapped and upside down.”
The physical and emotional strife of being locked inside together with the virus is ripe in the looming atmosphere of “Saturday,” which is bruised and haunting, piano underscoring their zombie-like vocals. The addition of coughs and other echoing field recordings add to the feeling of being cut off from the world when it’s right outside the door. There is still beauty in “Saturday,” the duo’s voices still combining to create the trademark IDER sound, even in this state, and it lifts the song out of the doldrums. During the elegiac chorus, they cast their minds back to how it used to be, subtle strings adding a romance to their wistful musings – “Saturday, I remember you”. We’re all clinging to the weekend now, hoping we’ll get back there eventually.
You can listen to IDER on streaming platforms or watch the video below.
With more looking like it’s just around the corner from IDER, make sure you follow them on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
