Flume has seemingly confirmed his imminent return to the limelight, sharing an ambient new tune with a teaser video – plainly labelled ‘2022’ – and pointing fans towards his mailing list.
Helmed by visual artist Jonathan Zawada – with whom Flume linked up with on the visuals for his ‘Skin’, ‘Quits’ and ‘Hi This Is Flume’ records, as well as a recent batch of NFTs – the video slowly pans through a CGI jungle, centring on a psychedelic cockatoo before zooming into its pupil to show the bright, kaleidoscopic contents of its mind.
It’s soundtracked by an unexpectedly tranquil passage, driven by reverberant, tastefully glitched-out piano chords and a warm, warbly melody framed around a modulated vocal sample. Especially notable is a brief cameo from Damon Albarn, who at the very end of the track, sings: “I thought that beyond the exit / There would be palaces.”
Take a look at the ‘2022’ video below:
Fans have waited patiently for the fruits of this team-up, with the Blur and Gorillaz frontman teasing all the way back in January 2019 that he’d hit the studio with Flume. Albarn was absent on that year’s ‘Hi This Is Flume’ mixtape, while Flume is also yet to appear on Gorillaz’s ongoing, collab-based ‘Song Machine’ project.
Flume released his first new music in over a year last August, sharing a bassy remix of Danny L Harle’s track ‘On A Mountain’. It followed his take on Eiffel 65’s classic tune ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’, which came in at Number 54 on the triple j Hottest 100 for 2020. Earlier in 2021, Flume teamed up with G Flip and comedian Froomes (aka Lucinda Price) for the joke song ‘FROOMESWORLD’.
His last full-length release was ‘Hi This Is Flume’ in March 2019, which he followed with ‘Quits’ – a collaborative EP with Vancouver rapper Reo Cragun – that August, and the Toro y Moi-featuring single ‘The Difference’ in March 2020.
In December of 2019, Flume revealed plans to begin work on his third album, saying: “I’m really looking forward to it and seeing what happens, seeing what comes out.”