Song You Need: HTRK wander into lo-fi bliss on “No Big Thing”

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Listening to an artist's demos is very sensitive to context. No matter how much I love hearing Prince finding his way through a song on collections like Originals and Piano & A Microphone, the fact that these albums were released without the famously controlling artist's expressed permission can make hearing them feel like an intrusion.

"No Big Thing," a song from HTRK's new collection of demos and rarities called Death Is A Dream, was released by the Melbourne lo-fi duo themselves, but it still feels like you're wandering into a moment of intense creative and personal vulnerability. Solitude is the song's overarching theme from the jump – windswept guitar and a drum machine are reverbed into oblivion, evoking a bar in a ghost town somewhere deep in a forgotten United State. "Don't you tell me that it's no big thing," Jonnine Standish sings as if addressing a dream's apparition. "Babe it's fine / You're a premonition, just in time."

Most of the songs on Death Is a Dream appeared on the band's excellent 2021 project Rhinestones in different drafts, and "No Big Thing" would shed some of the Mazzy Star-meets-Hype Williams vibes to become "Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings." Seeing the song in its original, raw shape is both a gift for fans of the original and an invitation from the band to everyone, regardless of their familiarity, to see just how they arrive at their magic.