Obviously, being one half of disco punk mavens Sink Ya Teeth, Maria Uzor knows a thing or two about night club melancholia. Her solo single “Ventolin” is a sleek and steely electro-wave drill (with actual drilling sounds, no less) that could trigger a vast array of sexy, strutting poses on the runway. Looks can be quite deceiving however.
Uzor’s sultry, propellent delivery acts as a veneer of cool that’s painted over the song’s true meaning: an introspective coping song that addresses her dealings with asthma. “I’ve had asthma since I was a kid,” Uzor says of “Ventolin”, the first track she wrote for upcoming LP Soft Cuts, out October 13 via Castles In Space.“I thought I’d write something that my fellow respiratory-challenged crew could sway along to on the dancefloor without having to go to casualty. Big up to the asthmatics!”
Uzor describes Soft Cuts as “a loose concept album”, a collection of songs holding aloft lightness and imagination, celebrating the act of transcending against the gravitational pull of trauma and despair. “It’s based on a character’s journey from the cosmos into flesh being,” she continues. “At first there’s a sense of naivety and wonder, the joy of the child. But after a while on this planet things begin to dull and then contort that sense of joy and we lose sight of who we actually are.“
“The album is about the journey from and then back to self-realisation. How do you keep a hold of your light in the face of adversity? How do you enable that child in your core to continue to shine when there’s so much around to bury it?”
Find “Ventolin” on Bandcamp, and watch the video below.
Soft Cuts arrives on October 13 via Castles in Space. Follow Maria Uzor on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
