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Live Review: Ella Thompson's 'Hysteria' is a gorgeous song about messy interiors

17 October 2018 | 9:26 am | Kyle Fensom

The second single off her first solo EP in three years, Ella Thompson's 'Hysteria' is a beautiful mess about internal lives wrapped in a gorgeous exterior

GL/DORSAL FINS/BAMBOOS member and all-round general Melbourne mainstay, ELLA THOMPSON is readying her first solo work since 2015, the upcoming Hysteria EP, for release in early November. Today, she’s followed up lead single ‘Snow’ with the EP’s title track.

Wrapped in a gorgeous, floating exterior, ‘Hysteria’ is about the messiness of our interior emotional lives, and how this messiness gets interpreted, framed and misunderstood by an outside world. An enveloping wall of synth pads, reverb-soaked melodies and hushed electronic percussion creates a blanket for the emotional restlessness moving underneath, as Thompson packages her musings on gender, discourse and psychology in a deceptively light cloud.

Of the track, Thompson explains that, “‘Hysteria’ is about the way in which we are told to monitor our emotions, the ways in which we are told to guard ourselves, it’s a song for the madness that gets curled up inside, all the things that are still growing even if we cut them back, they might be invisible but they matter. It is looking at the gendered historical discourses of madness. The video is another collaboration with PRUE STENT and HONEY LONG, we spent the day with a few friends who are dancers, bodies interlocking act as human furniture."

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For the visuals, Thompson connects again with renowned artists Prue Stent and Honey Long, who also directed the video for lead single ‘Snow’ and once again bring their distinct, softly surreal aesthetics to the fore, pairing the external world with physical manifestations representative of Thompson's inner life. In capturing the relationship between the two, the dichotomy between inside/outside worlds and our interior/exterior selves seems to fade away beneath Stent and Long's direction.

As yet another extension of the messiness of Thompson's interior world into our's, we should be grateful that 'Hysteria' is such a beautiful mess.

IMAGE: Supplied

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