It’s 2:34am as you lay in bed staring at your ceiling. The LED mood lighting you bought on Amazon is tinted a deep magenta as you stare longingly through your phone. The display of your phone flashes photo after photo of your ex, who despite how much you pretend you are not over, and in this moment you feel a mix of deep depression and the urge to absolutely explode. It’s a scene that’s fairly universal with slight tweaks (for example, I have real blacklights instead of LEDs, but I digress), and also a scene that’s captured in perfection within katie MAC’s screen.

I’ve talked previously about how I’m a huge proponent of using vocoder in modern production, but to boil down that much larger tangent into a quick tidbit I’ll just say that I feel like there’s no better way to amplify the emotional intensity of a moment than to layer the resynthesized lead vocals into the perfect chord progression. I’ve got a mental shortlist of all my favourite recent examples of songs leveraging that idea, and screen has been sitting near the top of that list since before the launch of AuraLink. While not being exclusively vocoded like something like Imogen Heap’s hide and seek (you know, the mmwhatchasay song Jason Derulo sampled), screen only uses a small handful of production elements throughout to further accent what is almost entirely a vocal lead track. The vocals themselves are a tremendous balance of delicate reflective verses and belted outbursts for the chorus. It’s a combo that feels incredibly authentic to the lyrical content of watching someone’s life move on without you through pictures and videos online. It swaps between that passive regret and raging despair that broods as you lie alone in your room, and it does so in a way that feels so down-to-earth and relatable to the listener that I can’t help but appreciate what I can only imagine was a level of personal hurt that went into making it.

About 2 thirds of the way through we get really interesting though, as suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of a 3/4 ballad for the bridge that’s simultaneously dainty and distorted. The light plucks and vocals dial us back to incredibly introspective territory as we analyze the long term experience of our watching from the outside from our digital hell, but as we progress these distorted kicks cut through the mix clipping the whole thing as we build to the song’s final climax. These kicks are like pangs of anger cutting through our grieving and they become more and more frequent as we fixate on whats gone wrong, leading to a final moment of immense pressure before… nothing. We’re back in our room, staring at the ceiling, watching life move on through a screen.

I’ll reiterate, I’m a sucker for vocoder. But vocoder on its own doesn’t make a good song. You can (and many people have) run Family Guy clips through a vocoder to the USSR national anthem and it makes for a funny clip, but it’s not a work of art in the way screen is. It’s something sculpted bit by bit from sheer raw feelings and hurt into 3 minutes and 12 seconds of pure cinema. Acting as the closing track for katie’s EP glitchpop! (which has more than one great cut on it and is worth checking out in full, I’m particularly fond of you’re here but your not) screen does exactly what any good closing track should do: leave you thinking. It leaves you with this empty thought either reflecting on a time when you felt that, or thinking far too hard about what you’re going through right now. It’s incredibly powerful both as a standalone and as a greater part of the EP it belongs to, and it’s the sort of thing that leaves me incredibly excited to see whatever comes next from katie MAC. But until then, use this screen of yours to go give it a listen.