Flume and Caroline Polachek share “Sirens”

Australian rave futurist Flume will soon share his new album Palaces. Out on May 20, the project promises a number of vocal collaborations, and such an endeavour arguably would be incomplete without a feature from Caroline Polachek, whose new-age approach to vocal melody continues to spin pop music on its head ("Billions" is a top five song of the year, still). On Wednesday, Flume and Polachek let loose on their long-promised collaboration "Sirens."

The new song feels like a response from Flume to the constant comparisons of modern electronic music to space-age vehicles and star cruisers. "Sirens" has the rhythm and sonic quality of a sputtering jalopy, exhausted and belching its last puff of black smoke. In conjunction with the instrumental's vision of a corrupted dancefloor filler, Caroline Polachek turns up the elegiac, affecting melodies. Listen below:

“Caroline and I had known each other for years," Flume wrote in astatement, "but she'd just moved to L.A. and we bumped into each other living down the street. We started playing weekly games of Magic The Gathering with A.G. Cook and a few friends. We started doing a session, and Danny L Harle showed me a voice note from Caroline with some very early stages of vocals. I loved it and went back in on it during the pandemic.”

“I was living by myself in London," Polacheck says, "and it was the darkest time in the pandemic. I was really going through it, feeling so small, unable to control anything in the world, and the lyric ‘sirens’ was in reference to constant ambulances I was hearing.”

Palaces will also contain features from Damon Albarn, Oklou, Kučka, Vergen Maria, and MAY-A, who appears on the project's lead single "Say Nothing."