Song You Need: The enchanting indie pop of Fauness’s “Mystery”

The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.

Fauness is the rare kind of pop artist who makes music that fully feels like stepping into a secret garden, its textures and themes manicured yet exciting and wild, a space that would be choked out by clumsier hands. Active since 2018, Cora Gilroy-Ware's alias has stuck to releasing EPs and singles instead of a full body of work. If she was taking her time, the strategy paid off: just last year, Fauness's single "Dragonfly" came in at No. 64 on our Best Songs of 2021 list. That all changes this fall, when Fauness will release her debut album The Golden Ass on October 28 via Cascine, co-produced by Fauness and Jam City. Today, she premieres the music video for its just-released lead single "Mystery."

For Fauness newcomers, "Mystery" is the perfect introduction to her overarching style. Glossy, marbled guitar tones trace across a soaring sound like stripes of cloud, but the fantastical and cathartic mood Fauness creates so elegantly is rooted in deeply introspective and even academic concerns. When she sings "RIP Mystery / Now it's just her memory" on the song's sunburst-colored chorus, her words nestle cozily in the creases of your brain, refusing to leave until you listen again, but deeper this time. The music video for the song – directed and produced by Fauness – has a similar effect. Fauness performs in a palatial setting as if posing for a series of paintings while the camera occasionally cuts away to a regal-looking cryptid touring the outside world.

In a statement, Fauness told us about the creation of the song and its accompanying video. "For a while, I’ve been thinking about how the concept of 'Mystery' is obsolete. Transparency and complete exposure seem to possess the beguiling, coveted allure that mystery once had. The song is an elegy to the idea of mystery, and for the video, I wanted to create an embodiment of the concept, a masked character who makes her way into the sea and disappears. I thought that there’s no one better to narrate Mystery’s passing than the maenad, a type of nymph from Greek mythology. Holding her tambourine and sacred staff, a thyrsus, the maenad describes Mystery’s departure from this world."