When you listen to music as often as I do, it’s rare to come across a new piece of music that knocks me sideways and makes me feel like I’m suspended in a free fall, but I always appreciate the feeling when it does. It feels both dangerous and euphoric, wiping my brain of all conscious thought while I dance on the astral plane. When I listen to “numb,” the brand new single by avant-garde electronic artist Julia-Sophie (formerly of Candy Says and Little Fish), that’s how I feel.
Against a danceable backdrop of warm synth-pads and winding electronic drum beats, Julia-Sophie puts a voice to her self-destructive thoughts, wryly uttering in a whispery tone, “Sinking alone / Love is not enough / It’s the crying and the punch / And although I want to forget / Some things never change / Right now I’m numb.”
When I hear these words against the ethereal and high-strung instrumental production, I feel the same way Larissa Pham describes when she writes about the act of running, pushing her physical limitations as far as they can possibly go until she reaches a state of almost non-existence and ascends to another state of being, however short it may last.
“It was this nothing I was after–the moment where the noise of my brain cut out and I crested onto that smooth, high plane of emptiness, empty of feeling, empty of thought, my body churning out its own high. It was a beautiful place to be, however briefly the feeling lasted–ten minutes, maybe fifteen.” – Larissa Pham, Pop Song
In the case of “numb,” the feeling lasts exactly 5 minutes and 26 seconds, but instead of feeling nothing, my brain rapidly oscillates between thinking nothing and feeling everything. I deeply resonate with the lyric “And instead of loving you back / I cheated and I lied, I lost myself in drugs and I lost myself inside.” When you think about it, self-sabotage is the most logical response to trauma. You stop believing it’s possible for anything good to happen to you, so as soon as something does, you decide to wreck it yourself so nobody else can.
“numb” is the lead single from Julia-Sophie’s forthcoming debut solo album forgive too slow, in which she plumbs the depths of her inner psyche and explores her histories with love, loss, and self-destruction. “My journey with music has been weird and long,” she says. “I think people assumed that the music I made was exactly what I intended to make, when it’s always just been me trying to figure it out. Being a solo artist has allowed me to really find myself and show who I am in all my messy states.”
“numb” is available now on all DSPs, and forgive too slow will be out on July 26th via Ba Da Bing Records.
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