"Toybox" sees beachtown find liberation in stability

Musically disruptive but sonically serene, "Toybox" deftly weaves its myriad threads together. Be it the staccato sounds of the percussion, the delicate acoustic guitar lines pooling beneath the vocals, or the track’s devolution outro providing a whistle-stop tour of all the influences and areas that have been hinted at or touched on. The busy but blended nature of their sound is starting to become a beachtown calling card, and on "Toybox" our key ingredients are breakbeats, bossa nova, and a dynamic vocal line haunting the song’s upper layers.

beachtown is comprised of Fred Cowan and Zaine Masoliver, from London and Menorca respectively, brought together by fate and by converging musical tastes in line for a gig in Kingston in 2019. Four years in now, they’ve put in their thousand hours in bedroom studios experimenting with the most intricate nuances of their sound, which goes well beyond the ‘indie’ label whilst maintaining its sunny, inviting core.

Following in the footsteps of the likes of Mura Masa and Dijon, the pair refuse to sit still - across their last release "Homesmaker" you can hardly relax into the mellow dreaminess without being snapped awake by a surprising, charming sound bubbling in the background. In amongst the densely populated collection of ‘found sounds’ beachtown have accumulated, though, is a real knack for telling a story with what they choose to put where, and creating a distinctive atmosphere.

“With "Toybox" we really wanted to convey a sense of freedom,” the pair explain. “The song is about wanting to keep things the way they are and resisting change. It was a metamorphosis of sorts stylistically which was very liberating and in keeping with the message of the song… I felt like we were stepping into a different dimension and harnessing a different part of our brains every time we worked on it, we pushed boundaries a little; mixing Bossa-Nova with breakbeat.”