Australian indie-pop artist Gordi, aka Sophie Payten, has announced her third album Like Plasticine, due for release on Friday, May 30th via Mushroom Music.
She’s also shared the new single, “Peripheral Lover”, written during a hot summer in Nashville.
“It was damn hot,” she recalls. “I was there for a week to write, staying in some Airbnb that was actually just someone’s garage with a touch of plumbing.”
The track delves into the early stages of queer relationships, when one person is still in the closet. “Accepting the available love instead of it orbiting around you. There comes a breaking point, a demand, a pleading for honesty – and the relationship either explodes into the open, or melts from the periphery away into nothing,” she explains.
Written in just three hours, the song’s path to completion wasn’t as quick, with several false starts.
“It’s a simple song with a simple message, and so I wrote KISS (keep it simple, stupid) on a post-it note and stuck it on my desk in Melbourne, while I layered up guitars and synths and drums. Me at my most ‘pop’ – terrifying and ludicrously fun.”
For the music video, Gordi teamed up with Jared Frieder, director of Three Months, the Troye Sivan-starring film for which she co-wrote “Wait.” Shot in Dallas on a blistering 45-degree day, the clip sees Gordi dragging a kissing booth through the city. “We’d put a call out to any non-male queer people in Dallas who were up for coming to the shoot and making out with a total stranger – unsurprisingly, an abundance of people showed up (and all went for drinks together after, bursting my heart open).”
On Like Plasticine, Gordi processes years of transformation—from coming out and reshaping her future to working on the frontline as a doctor during the pandemic. “Being surrounded by death made me think about how beautiful life is…. I thought about all the ways we are like plasticine in life – how forces we can’t control, contort us into shapes, stretch us thin, and test our resilience,” says Payten. “But sometimes, heart-wrenching change can be a thing of beauty.”
The upbeat pop of “Peripheral Lover” will feature on Like Plasticine alongside recent single, the experimental “Alien Cowboy”.
“On the first page of my notebook – where all the songs from this record are written – I wrote in the top corner “inject emotion into everything”,” Gordi shares. “It was about making the music as undaunted as the stories within it.”
Gordi’s “Peripheral Lover” is out now via Mushroom Music.
