Rare Element (feat. Britt Foe from Lunar & the Deception) take on “Fields of Joy” as a single, and it lands like finding a meticulously crafted ship-in-a-bottle washed up on a neon-lit beach. You have the producer duo, Hedge Seel and Jerry Kandiah, laying down this framework of pulsing electronic heartbeats and synth textures that feel both organic and meticulously engineered, a surprising bedrock for a cover. Then Britt Foe’s vocals arrive, less a performance and more a presence, ethereal but grounded, lending an almost prayer-like quality to the whole affair.

The track aims for this very specific pocket: finding an almost defiant peace, a profound joy because the world outside is, well, doing its usual chaotic thing. It’s about burrowing into a shared bubble of love within a natural setting, letting the complexities – the cities, the pressures – dissolve like sugar in rain. There’s a texture to the synths at one point, a certain shimmering delay, that inexplicably reminds me of the slightly metallic tang the air gets just before a proper summer downpour. Strange, I know. But it’s that mix of the synthetic and the deeply naturalistic that Hedge Seel and Jerry Kandiah are playing with here.

This isn’t just gentle escapism; there’s a weight to it, an undercurrent suggesting the ‘apocalyptic turmoil’ mentioned in their notes isn’t just background noise but the very reason this sanctuary feels so potent, so necessary. It’s the sound of two souls building a fortress out of intimacy and shared breath, walled off by towering digital trees and powered by an electric current of devotion.

It settles in the ears with a kind of quiet intensity, a high-definition intimacy against a low-rumble backdrop of vague trouble. Does finding such pristine, walled-off joy require the world outside to be falling apart?

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