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“Waking up just to find / You’re hanging out in my mind / Beggin’ you were with me / Wishin’ I was your type / I can’t seem to cut the cord / Runnin’ straight to your side / You’re pullin’ it for what you need / You know I’ll be there anytime.”
Intimate but viciously honest. Humble but surprisingly cutting and forthright. Indicating a desire to be there, but dizzyingly straying towards a feeling of self-comfort simply impossible to find when being relied on by others 100%. We’re inside the mind of Chris Ning in his new single “Explode” and a selection of verses that really affected me when I sat down with it just this past weekend, and from my perspective, these words yield the sort of emotionality that has the potential to launch his career into a new level of respect and appreciation from fans and critics the same.
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Lyrics aren’t the only avenue through which we feel the intensity of Ning’s passion in “Explode;” truthfully, I think they’re made all the more tangible through the physical presence of the instrumentation, both backend and front. The bassline and percussive components in the song aren’t even all that indulgent, but when collectively joined to the other melodic elements in the mix, it forms the kind of sonic hurricane that most singers simply wouldn’t be able to stand up to on their own.
Without the kind of plasticity behind the board that a lot of his closest competitors in and outside of Canada would rely on when producing new music, Ning delivers catharsis seemingly around every critical bend in “Explode.” The electric guitar solo towards the conclusion of the single is astoundingly loud and brash, but the freeing sense of coming undone it leads us to is beyond beautiful, and perhaps more so when enjoyed in the track’s companion video.
The music video for “Explode” merges the conceptualism of the composition itself with the personality of Ning’s performance when everything – both artist and the material – is totally isolated from any and all external influences. Here, he’s letting go of so much in the simplest of terms possible, making even the more reserved moments of powerful rhythm and rhyming sound like it’s coming from a human place rather than an artificially-faceted studio source. It’s applause-worthy, and by far some of the sweetest content I’ve heard from a Canadian pop musician in the last year.
I hadn’t heard Chris Ning before getting introduced to him just this month via his incredible discography, but if what he’s been cooking up inside of the studio in 2020 is giving us a solid indication of what his future is going to sound like, I won’t be missing out on any of his upcoming output. This is a transitional and transformative period in the history of Ning’s genre, but by staying away from the aesthetical pitfalls a lot of his contemporaries are walking head-on into, this purist is carving out his own place in the international hierarchy of profound millennial talent.
by Bethany Page
