Wow! Where did this one come from?
The press release sent to me by NATHAV (Mathilde Lunderskov) couldn’t have prepared me for this.
She has previously played in Lovebites (presumably not the Japanese female metal band), Blake (not the Spanish one) and Umatic, which is Danish for sure.
I know little of any of those bands but even if I did this would have blindsided me completely.
With Nathav (‘Night Sea’ in Danish), her business is potent dark electronic pop with, here at least, a heavy dose of blues.
The song we’re looking at, ‘You still miss her’, was the first of two singles off the four-track EP ‘Moon River’, which is released today, 29th November, promising “a deluge of misfortune and doomed love affairs – with a hint of the unbearable lightness of being” which I interpret as indicating a Bohemian existentialist flavour to it.
It sounds like it’s going to be a soppy ballad but it’s anything but that. Following a similar plot to Flora Smith’s ‘Thinking of you’ which we featured a few nights ago, in which the subject sings of her regret for allowing herself to be enticed by someone who is already ‘spoken for’, here the roles are reversed with Nathav feeling inadequate as she stands in the shadow of a previous love of the object of her affections, perhaps having dithered and moved in too late.
‘You still miss her’ is presented as a musical form you don’t often hear, what might be called ‘electro blues’. It’s silky and smooth, it might have come out of the mouth of Ella Fitzgerald or Aretha Franklin as it builds around an asymmetrical 5/8 (3+2) metre played on the piano.
Then about half way through a battalion of synthesisers enter the fray and when they twice reach a crescendo, allied to Nathav’s piercing, pitch perfect, soprano, they could blow your head off if you don’t moderate your headset.
It’s so unusual to hear a composition like this these days that its impact will take a couple of hearings to sink in properly.
It seems she was starting to make a name for herself back in 2015 almost 10 years ago with songs in Danish but family matters and the pandemic took her out of rotation until this year and this new clutch of songs performed in English.
Which leaves me asking two questions:
What have we been missing?
How long will it be before British radio stations pick up on her? Not long, surely.
Find her on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_nathav_/
