Brisbane electronic/alt-R&B artist, cln has released his new single, “Undone” featuring Melbourne artist Holly Hebe today. Serving as the first taste of his upcoming second full-length album, “Undone” is a dreamy, yet bittersweet track that finds cln and Holly longing for a past love. The song also marks a sonic shift in cln’s music, and a fresh new chapter. Listen to it now below.
Of the song, cln explained, “Undone is the first single from my sophomore album, and it also represents quite a bit of a sonic shift for me. The album is stacked with features, which is quite a contrast to Dawn Chorus which only had one. I can’t quite pin down the genre, it’s a bit of a mixed bag but in hindsight I think it has much more of an indie feel to my previous work. Electronic music is always at the core of what I do, but for this album I leaned more towards vintage synth sounds and drew inspiration from totally different places to my previous works.
This song started with the drums and the piano that you can hear most clearly in the verses. That piano sound was actually played a couple octaves higher, and then I added some heavy reverb and compression and then bounced the audio and pitched it down. It kind of gives it an underwater sound which I really like. I did a super rough chorus vocal (which had a tonne of background noise) and did up a quick demo which I then sent to Holly. Holly is an exceptional Australian artist and songwriter. I sent her the rough demo and she quickly sent me back the two verses with all the backing vocals already perfectly tracked and comped. Then I re-built all the production around her verse, and that was pretty much it. I tried to re-do my chorus a few times but couldn’t get anything that sounded as good as the original take. So, the vocal that you hear in the chorus is just the original dodgy demo vocal, I just tidied it up a tonne when I mixed the song. You can still hear some of the background noise if you listen closely, but I kind of like it that way.”