CO-PRODUCED BY TOM IANSEK & SEAN COOK

Today, Brisbane art-rock outfit Moreton returns with their latest single, ‘Down & Out’. The track follows their appearance on Jordan Rakei’s Late Night Tales installment, a national tour run with #1 Dads, and the announcement of their win as part of the APRA Professional Development Award for 2022 this last month. LISTEN HERE + WATCH HERE.

Co-produced by Tom Iansek (Big Scary, #1 Dads, No Mono) and Sean Cook (SharonVanEtten, AngelOlsen, St Vincent) alongside lead singer and guitarist Georgia James Potter, ‘Down & Out’ is rife with a murmured yet sonorous sense of drama. Flickering to life with a stuttering beat, fragile guitar chords and Potter’s deep, Sharon Van Etten-like vocals all locked in a tense conversation with one another, Moreton’s brooding, rhythmic minimalism suffuses ‘Down & Out’ with a taut, charged atmosphere, teetering on the edge of eruption. 

Of the single, Moreton shares, “We wanted the song to feel uneasy but beautiful, like how it is to worry about someone you deeply care about. It’s about the complexity of realising you’ve gone beyond each other’s reach. And the allure of recklessness & sabotage. Why does it feel so good to destroy things?”. 

‘Down & Out’ swells inexorably towards its cinematic climax, each piece of the arrangement carried along in this push – the percussion that gradually fills out with each new iteration, the guitar chords that grow in growling conviction with each strum, the ghostly, harmonising background vocals that come to surround Potter on all sides. Caught in this delicate, slow-moving dance towards violence, the three members of Moreton evince a masterful understanding of restraint, turning ‘Down & Out’s dial of intensity ever slowly upwards, staking out their own territory with their latest offering. 

As Moreton, the three-piece transpose stories about the emotional heft of everyday life into ruminative art-rock that, expansive yet intimate, powerful yet brittle, nestles itself in the restive chemistry between the melancholic and the serene. Recalling the stately likes of The National, Grizzly Bear, and Portishead, the Brisbane outfit has amassed millions of combined streams, garnered praise from Clash Magazine, Rolling Stone Australia, KCRW, BBC6, BBC2 and more, as well as being highlighted as Feature Artist across both Double J and triple j Unearthed. ‘Down & Out’ arrives as their first new material since a pair of high profile collaborations, including ‘Count a Heart’, their duet with Jordan Rakei which appeared exclusively on his mix for iconic London series Late Night Tales, and 2019’s ‘See Yourself’ with James Vincent McMorrow.

‘Down & Out’ is out now, buy/stream it here.

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