With “Circles”, Hamburg’s finest indie rockers Palila release the third advance single from their new album “Mind My Mind”, which will be released on May 19 via DevilDuck. After the punchy and compact “Restless” and the rather relaxed grooving “Try to Fail Again”, “Circles” once again shows a completely different facet of Palila’s new album: It is the fastest and at the same time longest song the Hamburg trio has recorded in the studio so far. It is driven by a repetitive motorik that is rather atypical for Palila, while being held together by a melodic – and above all vocal – density that again characterizes the core of Palila’s songwriting. And this release has even more special features, but more on that in a moment.
First, about the song itself, “‘Circles’ is about the thoughts you’re stuck in, the emotions you thought you’d overcome – yet can strike back with full force,” the band says of the song’s content. “All of us know those spirals of thought that you just can’t get out of and that can haunt you day and night. That can drive you sheer insane. ‘Runnin’ round in circles’ – both inside and out.”
It’s a thematic concept that every creatively gifted person has their own unique vision on – and that’s exactly what Palila wanted other artist friends to be able to do. That’s why the song – which will be available once in an over six-minute original version as well as a significantly shortened radio edit – was in a sense outsourced to others. On the one hand, there is the young director and camera duo Alisa Sizyhk and Daria Penkova from the Ukraine, who shot their very own visualization of the circle of thoughts for “Circles” completely independently with the help of the two Ukrainian actors Oleksandr Koval and Alenka Konovalchuk – at numerous locations that are just as typical for Hamburg as they stand for man’s being lost in urban anonymity.
Secondly – and this was really a brave step because it was very unusual for a rock band – Palila handed over the raw tracks of the song to the renowned DJ and house producer Nils Kreffter aka Le Renard Rhythmique and gave him a free hand to create his very own version of “Circles”. The result is a fantastic minimal techhouse tune that is as far away from the original as possible, although he draws most of his ingredients from the original tracks. For instance, most of the sounds in his remix are based on the original vocals, artfully alienated and transferred into a radically different genre.
For Palila, both of these experiences and results were a big, thoroughly positive surprise. “It’s totally exciting what results when you just let other talented creatives have your material and see what they do with it,” the band finds. With the subtext of encouraging others to simply let things happen – and thus arrive at a result that is more than the sum of the individual parts.