Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.
Bristol-based musician Fenne Lily first gained Stateside notoriety after touring with the likes of Lucy Dacus and Andy Shauf, but now you have even more reason to pay attention to her (if her honey-smooth voice and vulnerable songwriting weren’t convincing enough): The singer/songwriter announced Tuesday her signing to stalwart indie label Dead Oceans, home to Bright Eyes, Phoebe Bridgers, Japanese Breakfast and more, and the news arrives with a stunning new single, “Hypochondriac,” which you can listen to below.
This song’s arrival follows Fenne Lily’s 2018 album, On Hold, which she self-released. Songs from that record, like “Top to Toe” and “For a While,” have been quietly and steadily gaining traction on DSPs, the former of which has more than 37 million streams on Spotify.
“Hypochondriac” is a buoyant and at times ambient indie-rock ballad, full of loping guitars and criss-crossing drum beats. With a little of TORRES-style slanted vocal delivery and a jammy rock flair, “Hypochondriac” is far more upbeat than the song’s subject matter may suggest. In the bridge, Lily continually tells herself, “Look alive,” before a chorus and a startlingly pretty key change take center stage. She ends the song with the relatable (especially during potentially overwhelming times such as these) line, “I’m waiting for a moment to stop and not feel so much.”
“The song’s theme was realised immediately; pressure to feel enough but not too much in a time of hyper connectivity, plus a personal reminder to be accountable for and have agency over the part of me that gravitates towards meltdown,” Lily says of the song in a statement. “It’s the first in a collection of tracks addressing myself as both the cause of and solution to my anxieties, as well as a shift in attention from predominantly relationship-based writing to a more self-reflective dialogue.”
Again, you can listen to “Hypochondriac” below. Further down, watch Lily’s 2018 Daytrotter session.