Renowned for his solitary nature, the Canadian artist opens up to others and to the world without relinquishing the sensitivity that nourishes his indie pop.
Some tracks possess this immense power to suspend the world and halt the passage of time for a few minutes. Like Don’t Need It, the opening track of MorMor’s second album.
On a brisk 2-step rhythm backed by shimmering synths and a crystalline guitar, the Canadian delivers one of his most moving tracks, a kind of painful release cry that, in his words, marks “the end of a long quest for love, perhaps even a father figure or external validation.”
Paradise with Celeste and a Few Dance Steps
Four years after his debut album, Semblance (2022), Seth Nyquist is back. Discovered with his EP Heaven’s Only Wishful (2018), the Toronto-born singer left a strong impression. Hypersensitive on record, on stage, and in interviews, MorMor had seemed to privilege his inner world over the rest, shy through fragility, solitary by excess of lucidity.
That period of solitude, precisely, is now behind him. On No One Alive Will Listen, the musician has collaborated with many people – including Celeste on the very beautiful Like Heaven –, tries out dance steps on Ecstasy and touches in almost every lyric his relationship with others.
Without, however, abandoning his heightened sensitivity, wrapped in soul, trip-hop, or even reverberated ballads (the finale Open Wounds). It may be the most striking thing about the album: MorMor seems to have changed something. As if he had decided to stop merely looking at the world from within and to venture into it.
No One Alive Will Listen (Promised Land Recordings). Out on October 30.
