UK dance-pop auteur Shygirl has been awfully busy in the past few years, and she'll follow her 2022 full-length debut Nymph with a new album called Swallow!, set to arrive next month. We've already posted her singles "Alyse" and "Lucky (Hymn)," and she shared another very cool track called "Mantra" yesterday. Shygirl co-produced "Mantra" with Clams Casino, Jd. Reid, and Karma Kid, and it's a pulsing, breakbeat-driven club anthem about seeking out transcendence through oblivion. Parts of its seem like intentional echoes of the Underworld classic "Born Slippy (Nuxx)."
With the videos from Swallow!, Shygirl is apparently building a whole world with repeating characters. The "Mantra" clip, directed by past Shygirl collaborator Austen Taylor Pease, follows the character Saskia, as portrayed by Gala Chambers, as her friends convince her to keep hanging out when she really wants to go home. She ends up at an outdoor daylight rave, where she loses track of her friends and finds some new ones, including Shygirl's own character Alyse. Check it out below.
Swallow! is out 11/6 on Because Music.