// Letters to YVYNYL //

ALMA “#naturanaturans”

/ While they’re touching dream pop in other tracks, this raw statement of a song comes off a lot like a new Mountain Man poem (who, coincidentally, released a new single covering Fiona Apple’s “Not Knife” on the same weekend). Musicians Alba S. Torremocha, Lillie R. McDonough, and Melissa Kaitlyn Carter have put together all the feelings about “put down your phone” in one lovely folky song. Here’s a little bit about how and why they made it.

Dear Mark,

We are a dream pop trio based in NYC - usually. The pandemic has separated us and we’re releasing our debut album during a time that is anything but usual. We’ve released our entire album behind the computer screen and via social media. It’s wonderful to have this privilege, but it also hurts. Not being able to be the social human beings that we are. Not being able to hug, to touch, to sing together and find the harmonic waves on our chest. That hurts.

Our newest single, #naturanaturans is tied to this experience. It’s a DIY anthem about the trials and tribulations of social media. Directly translated as “nature doing what nature does,” it explores the irony of how our natural choice is to not be natural when we have the chance, and how we lose ourselves in the scroll shaping our identities based on how others see us online.

The song came to one of us while we were chilling at home, scrolling through instagram. A targeted ad popped up, using female empowerment and body positivity prompts to sell… well, a corset. It was equally hilarious and infuriating to think that they didn’t even see the irony behind this choice. Just another attempt to make us feel like we should choose to be unnatural, no matter how painful or pointless. And that somehow we’re being empowered by doing so.

We started working on this project a year ago, before the pandemic. We wanted a song to perform live that would allow us to be truly raw and natural — just us, our bodies and our voices. #naturanaturans at its core invites us to feel into our own inherent completeness that exists beyond all of the likes, comments, and follows. There’s nothing that this song is without and the same is true for us as human beings. Then the pandemic hit and the song became the quintessence of ironic karma: we created a song to connect at a raw level, to be together, and suddenly we could only see each other through a screen.

For us, music IS medicine, you don’t need to purposely use it as such. It’s like going to sleep every night: you know you need it, and you don’t want to see what happens if you stop doing it.

With Appreciation,
Melissa + ALMA

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