- Words Notion Staff
Philadelphia duo Marian Hill have dropped a slow-burning new single featuring GASHI, "Little Bit".
Marian Hill is a duo which encompasses singer Samantha Gongol and producer Jeremy Lloyd. They made a humble start to their career in 2013, sending their joint-written single “Whisky” to numerous blogs looking for a signal boost. It eventually came with the release of their first EP, the next year, and their signing to a major label in 2015. They would chart in the top 50 of the Billboard 200 with the release of their first full album, Act One, in 2016.
The duo’s sound mixes electronic beats with Gongol’s sparse vocals and the saxophone, all filtered through and manipulated expertly with Lloyd’s direction. Now, with their new track “Little Bit”, they’re aiming to push themselves out of their comfort zone with the aid of collaborator GASHI, a proud Albanian native who utilises the sound of the Balkans to create his unique style of pop.
“Little Bit” is an exercise in musical play – the careful mixing and chopping of vocals, including those of GASHI, laid above a catchy, thrumming electronic beat. It’s a song which takes the listener on a looping journey through the conflicting moods a breakup can bring about, allowing all those battling emotions to share the same space without contradiction. It’s their way of making sense out of the almost inexplicable nature of emotions.
On the track, the duo have said: “In writing this album we made an effort to push ourselves outside our sonic comfort zone – “Little Bit” took shape as a result of these experiments. To this day we can’t even agree on what genre the song is and the lyrics landed on a specific perspective we realized we’d actually never quite written about before: seeing an ex for the first time after a long time has passed and feeling…nothing? Adding another perspective to this story felt right, and when GASHI sent us his verse it struck us how perfectly his emotional tone contrasted with Sam’s more distant malaise.”