'one layer' / Teether [Premiere + Music Video]
Clocking at just over 1 minute, Teether blows us away with new track “one layer” that considers the purgatorial world we live in.
If you’re based in Naarm (Melbourne), there’s no doubt that you’ve heard standout rap act Teether’s name blowing in the wind, either alongside producing partner in crime Kuya Neil, collaborating with jazz outfit Don Glori and Nikodimos, or solo like this hard-hitting opener.
Created in conjunction with a music video by Phillip Paul Dixon VII that shows a masked up Teether performing for the camera behind imprinted lyrics, “one layer” is the leading track of Teether’s forthcoming fourth solo album MACHONA: Afar, You Are an Animal, releasing via X Amount Records on May 27th. The album is inspired by his Tumbuka and Toccolan heritage, manifesting ideas of purpose, alienation, intergenerational trauma, survival, and respite, among others in a bid to self-discovery and acceptance.
Video by Phillip Paul Dixon VII
Like the theme of the album, which explores the natural process of self-discovery that engendered Teether’s creative process as he endured a solitary three month period of lockdown without internet, “one layer” is also the product of embracing the world we live in, guided by Teether’s perspective that looks both from the outside and within. He comments on the track:
““One Layer really was the song that defined this project for me. It was the first one finished if I recall correctly, and represented the energy I wanted to capture. The title refers to a theory I came across somewhere at some point: that this particular realm we live in is both heaven and hell - or some sort of purgatory. Whatever it is, it’s strange. It’s horrific and incredible all at once. Each line in this song is a lone thought that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the one before it. Just a bunch of first person experiences and observations. Put together though, it eventually makes sense. That’s life, you know? A bunch of shit happens and you gotta make some sort of sense of it at the end of the day. Or not… Depends what happens next.””
Stay up to date with Teether on Instagram, Facebook, Soundcloud and Twitter.
Header image by Nini (@nini___pu)
Thank you for reading this article. Before you leave the page, we’d like you to take a moment to read this statement. We are asking our readers to take action and stand with the BIPOC community who fight and endure the oppression and injustice of racial inequality.
Here in ‘Australia’, Indigenous people are the most incarcerated population on Earth. Countless lives have been murdered by white police, white government policies and this country’s white history, institutionalised colonialism and ongoing racial oppression. Racial injustice continues today under the phoney, self-congratulatory politics of ‘Reconciliation’ and the notion that colonialism is something that must be denied and forgotten, an uncomfortable artefact of the past.
Feeling guilty is not enough. We must take action, pay the rent, educate ourselves and acknowledge that empathy and sorrow for past actions is insufficient if this does nothing to prevent our current reality from extending into the future.
Please consider making donations to the following organisations (the list is so small and the work to be done is so large, do your research to find more grassroots, Indigenous-lead community organisations):
Indigenous Social Justice Association - fighting to stop Indigenous deaths in custody
Firesticks Alliance - who campaign for Indigenous land management, cultural burning and looking after Country