Mirror Ritual – Fear In All: New Song Of The Day

Mirror Ritual share new single and video, Fear In All, a song, the band claims was “a long time coming”.

Here’s the record company blurb:

Lochie Noble (he/him), Eli Polaczuk (he/him), Mia Kelly (she/they) and Riley Dick (he/him) perform as Mirror Ritual, a psychedelic pop group based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, NZ).

Formerly known as Transistor, Mirror Ritual craft lush melodies that float along in their dreamy riffs and fuzzy psychedelia.

Today they deliver ‘Fear In All’, a hypnotic daydream that’s warm and inviting, but unravels into a meditation on humanity’s collective loss of hope, a decay that is both societal and personal.

Fear In All finds Mirror Ritual in an explorative sonic space. Glistening guitars and phantom flutes float alongside relentless bass grooves and washed out vocals.

Fear In All has been a long time coming, originally conceived in 2018, the song has undergone a number of rewrites to make it what it is today. Noble explains “Back when we first started working on the song, I was still relying heavily on reverb, delay, and phased guitar to carry the songwriting. The song was hiding behind all of this for a good while, so I decided to peel it back and lean more into its ‘chamber-pop’ qualities. We added layers of mellotron flutes, strings, autoharps and nylon guitar that really brought it to life. There’s a good amount of weird sampling and more off-kilter recording tricks going on too, which is a nice contrast to the more composed instrumentation. 

While he keeps mum about the exact meaning of the lyrics, Noble lets slip the Fear In All is “mainly centred around our collective uncertainty of the future, and how popular culture seems to relentlessly mine the past, instead of cultivating new, exciting and risky modes of expression that reflect our rapidly collapsing world.”

Fear In All is accompanied by music with a music video directed by Hunter Blair (and made with support from NZ On Air Music), showing the band performing some high stakes Table Tennis. “Themes of competition, ego and betrayal stuck with Hunter,” says Noble. “Naturally, the world of table-tennis is fertile ground to explore all of this and was a great way to weave humour into the video. Despite hours upon hours of practicing my bat-to-ball coordination the night before shooting, it took many, many tries to get even one usable take out of me, all of which is a testament to Hunter’s patience as a director.”

Noble promises that Fear In All is just the beginning for Mirror Ritual: “the track is one slither of a lot of moving parts that we’re equally excited to share with everyone.”

Mirror Ritual (formerly known as Transistor from 2016 until the early months of 2022) was devised as Lochie Noble’s excursion into the world of DIY bedroom recording.

He released two reverb soaked EP’s, 2016’s transistor, and 2018’s Soft Burning Silver. The latter saw the inclusion of Riley Dick on drums, and scaled down the noise in favour of atmosphere. Singles ‘Waiting To Be Free’ and ‘All You Remember’ were playlisted on Apple Music’s Best of the Week, Spotify’s official Fresh Finds: Rock, and Under The Radar’s 2018 End of Year.

After a revolving lineup, Eli Polaczuk joined the group on bass, and the band placed emphasis on their live show. Mirror Ritual have supported international mind-melters such as Black Mountain (CAN), Earthless (US) and Heavenphetamine (JPN), as well as prominent local groups including Earth Tongue, Ha The Unclear, Na Noise, and The Nudge. They’ve graced the festival stages of Field of Dreams, Welcome To Nowhere, and were billed to perform at The Others Way in 2021 (that was inevitably cancelled due to COVID 19 restrictions).

2020 saw a quick succession of releases, the stand alone single Nothing New, an Nothing New Remix EP, and the Lights Form One To The Sun EP. In 2021 the group released Contextualise, a Student Radio Network chart topper, accompanied by the visual eye-candy of an Euphoric Co-directed music video.

Amidst the early collapse of the new decade, Mirror Ritual expanded their line up again to include Mia Kelly on synthesisers and guitar. Following the recent name change Mirror Ritual promise their debut album Aphantasma will be released in the not too distant future.