Its Only

There's a cathedral-like quality to the opening of this track, synth pads rising in long sustained tones that feel devotional before the beat even arrives. When the drums do come in they're deliberate and chest-centered, and the structure that builds around them is generous — this is music with room in it, architecture rather than density. Gonjasufi's voice, when it arrives, is one of the stranger choices ODESZA could have made and exactly the right one: raspy, unpolished, carrying decades of influence from soul and psychedelia into an electronic framework that has no obvious precedent for it. The lyric moves around the idea of elemental connection, of being claimed or calling out across distance, of the small private cosmologies we build around the people we love. Sonically it shares DNA with late-night R&B and planetarium ambient in roughly equal proportion. It's a track that lives on "A-Axis," ODESZA's 2014 EP that first demonstrated their capacity for genuinely strange and emotionally intelligent production decisions. You'd reach for this in the late hours, when conversation has lapsed and you want something playing that matches the diffuse, searching quality of thought before sleep — music that doesn't demand your attention but rewards it.