The New Citizen Kane is the project of Kane, a London artist who came to pop from theatre and multidisciplinary art, and it shows: he treats every release as a piece of world-building, with its own visuals, story and performance. He calls his sound "rhythm & synth," a blend of synth-pop and electronic textures where moving your body and feeling something are meant to go together. After the debut It's Not Science... It's A Feeling, the dreamlike The Tales of Morpheus and Psychedelika Pt.1, he is now in a bolder phase with Psychedelika Pt.2, which opened with the single "Metallic." His new single "interTWINE," out since October 2, is about the moment two lives start orbiting each other: curiosity, flirtation and attraction, and a gentle push to put the phone down and look for connection in the real world.

What's really interesting here is how Middle Eastern influences are worked into something fairly close to synthwave. The synths sound like a zurna, or maybe some other Middle Eastern instrument, and it's not only the timbres, the melodies lean that way too. The percussion hits hard and dense.

The call and response between the vocals and the synths is very well done, they keep answering each other. And in places it reminds me less of anything Middle Eastern and more of jazz fusion, something like Weather Report, with those synth leads.

The vocal is an interesting one: a tenor, but with the overtones of a baritone.

The video combines the Blade Runner aesthetic, which you'd expect in this context, with action-movie imagery and abstract art that seems to seep into the fabric of life, until you can't tell whether you're in reality or not. An interesting cocktail overall.

Watch the official video for "interTWINE" below.