Eden Rain‘s debut single, “Wake Up, You’re Stuck,” is out today.
Eden Rain is a 20-year-old artist raised in Leeds and currently based in London. A visual artist before she started to dip her toes in the music world, Eden has been sharing her sketches and drawings on her Instagram page for the past year. Her art follows many Gen-Z tropes: there’s the desire for identification and relatability, the brief hand-written verses scribbled over drawings of message texts or of daily life occurrences, the balance between self-deprecation and heart-in-your-sleeve vulnerability.
Her music adheres to the same tenets. Her first single, “Wake Up, You’re Stuck,” is a slow-paced and minimalistic piano song that eschews ear-catching melody in favour of an intimate ambience that borders on spoken-word. At times, it feels almost like Eden Rain half-reading, half-singing pages from her diary. The music makes it much more interesting, though. Her casual use of vocoders will ring a bell with fans of the less melodramatic iterations of Dirty Projectors and Bon Iver, particularly when the song reaches its self-flagellating emotional peak by the time it ends.
Eden Rain has also shared a video for the song. Directed by herself and including interpolations of her drawings, it is not merely a companion piece. If “Wake Up, You’re Stuck” is meant to be a first point of contact with the art of Eden Rain, then the song’s music video, with its DIY images of everyday activities, is almost as integral to this presentation of her project as the music itself.