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Right from the get-go in the new single “Milky Way Rising,” Hourstone is spinning us in a hundred different directions with a swirling bassline skewed with acrylic textures emanating from his vicious backdrop. The arrangement for the song plays out like a fireworks display littered with the verses slipping from singer Amanda Kang’s lips in real-time, and despite its intellectual construction, the narrative that the words are attempting to convey is never lost on us amidst the tizzy of majestic tones being vaulted in our direction. The tempo is pendulous and the bass lumbering, but the drums are as light as a feather, seasoning the melody with an agile dexterity that will emphasize the color in Kang’s voice like no other component possibly could. “Milky Way Rising” isn’t your typical pop song, and its composer is far from your typical artist.
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After the opening salvo of muscular musicality finishes discharging its thunderous introduction to the climactic chorus, the pace of the song seems to shift slightly and with an almost jazzy twist to minimize the augmented transition. The vocal seemingly drops an octave as the seriousness of the tone overtakes the energy in the lyrics, but that isn’t snuffing out the optimistic melody that a chic synth part is generating from a distance. The drums are still attacking us with all the fury of an out-of-control wildfire, but Hourstone is doing his part to keep them separated from the gliding strut of the bass, which has as much swagger as his lyrical might possesses in this track.
At the midway point in the track, Amanda Kang makes it her purpose to sweeten the song with an erotic harmony conjured almost out of nowhere, and the soft timbre of her voice balances out the weightiness of the instrumentation perfectly. There’s never a doubt as to who the star of the show is in “Milky Way Rising,” but at the same time, it’s hard to imagine this single without this angelic serenade after listening to it several times and, admittedly, addicted to its gravity-defying grooves. She and Hourstone bring out the best in each other’s artistic personalities in this song, and I think that it adequately spotlights the talents of both performers supremely. The master mix generously affords the vocal track a lot of space in the big picture, and while they’re uniquely contrasting on paper, the collective verses make an unforgettable magic that is reason enough on its own to buy into the hype surrounding this single.
“Milky Way Rising” dissipates into the stoic silence from which it first arose epically, and as the music escapes our grasp in the fleeting seconds before coming to a stop, the boisterous beats that framed Hourstone’s lyrics continue to linger in the atmosphere around us. This is one pop single that will get stuck in your head after a single listen, and though it’s only one of many startlingly evocative and on-point songs that Hourstone has released in his career, it may well be his most endearing yet. All in all, I’m quite eager to hear where this bold sound takes him next.
Jennifer Munoz
