22 October 2024 - 0 Comments

Serebii and his band release a jazzy-soulful live performance video featuring swirling cinematic instrumentals for first single Might As Well Be Watching.

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Watch the live performance here

On Dime, Serebii (aka Callum Mower) has a gentle croon deceptive in its power— and using that voice, he’s created an album unlike anything he’s done before, rolling seamlessly from track to track—not just a collection of songs but a singular project conceived to work together as a unified statement.

Serebii explains the story behind first album single Might As Well Be Watching out today:

"Observation and involvement often come hand in hand, time and again I experience some form of conflict with feeling seen and heard, accepting that sometimes being in the background is the most natural place to be. I wrote this song towards the end of summer in 2023 in my home studio in Titirangi, Auckland, New Zealand, I finished mixing it in January 2024. I remember this being the first time I felt the urge to have strings on a record. I reached out to Arjuna Oakes who had just settled in London at the time, he circled back with some incredible charts and demo strings, he said.. you need to do this properly and get good string players. We reached out to Tom Broome who got together the right people and we went on to do the thing."

For his second full-length LP and most realized release as Serebii yet, Callum Mower had one thing he had to overcome first: he was “terrified” of himself.

After establishing the Serebii project with several albums’ worth of trancing neo-soul and shape-shifting ballads, much of it done in collaboration with fellow New Zealander Arjuna Oakes, Mower had no lack of confidence in his musical abilities. But much of Mower’s focus in the past was on instruments and production under his own name or funky art-pop jams with others on vocals. On Dime, however, Mower knew he wanted to push forward with his own singing placed center stage. “It’s exposing,” Mower says of releasing music so heavy on his singing. “It feels like you’re walking into the public naked.”

For a few months, Mower did little besides eat, sleep, and make music. Outside of a deep love for the music of Aldous Harding, which he takes as inspiration, Mower didn’t listen to much outside of his own work. Instead, he focused on developing a routine: yoga, walks, free writing in the morning to get everything out instead of letting it bottle in. “Just trying to feel, trying to release, and then going in and conjuring that while you’re hovering over a chord progression,” he explains. “Just focus on expression.”

Photo Credit: Kaja Stiehler

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