The UK singer-songwriter Billie Marten was making astounding music as a teenager around the same time as that other Billie, and we've been checking for her here at Stereogum for nine dang years now. She's getting ready to follow up 2023's Drop Cherries with a new LP called Dog Eared, and its opening track single "Feeling" is out now.
Marten worked on Dog Eared with Phil Weinrobe, the producer who's done excellent work with Adrianne Lenker, and it includes contributions from esteemed musicians like Sam Evian, Sam Amidon, Shahzad Ismaily, and Maia Friedman among many others. They recorded live, and Weinrobe calls the results "a fucking miracle." Like "Crown," the preview track Marten put out last year, "Feeling" infuses her folk-pop stylings with immersive texture and a contagious momentum. It's both gorgeously graceful and head-bob catchy. And as Marten explains in her statement accompanying the song, that focus on rhythm was intentional:
I've discovered that I have a really particular long-term memory: I have specific sensory recollections from when I was two onwards, that I can recall easily now. One of these is marking out roads in my grandmother’s patterned carpet, for my Dad’s old 1950/60s toy cars to drive on. I used to trace patterns in everything: fabric seats at the dentist, carpets, wallpaper and walls, raindrops on car windows. Everything had a pattern to be noticed.
Another strong memory is the feeling of big, warm hands when you’re a child and how comforting and safe that feels. The notion of age being so far away from you, but you know it's a future inevitability, and that you’re on your way there. The inarticulateness of that "feeling" you can’t describe yet, but you’re aware of a push in the world that you don’t yet understand.
"Feeling" is really set alight by Núria Graham’s guitar part, the one you hear from the outset. It sparks the album info life and really sets a benchmark in terms of rhythm. This is an album of rhythmic focus.
Check out the Callum Devlin-directed "Feeling" video and "Crown" below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Feeling"
02 "Crown"
03 "Clover"
04 "No Sudden Changes"
05 "The Glass"
06 "Leap Year"
07 "Goodnight Moon"
08 "Planets"
09 "You And I Both"
10 "Swing"
Dog Eared is out 7/18 via Fiction. Pre-order it here.
