Following on from the captivating avant-pop single ‘Dinner’, our favourite Greek artiste Lia Hide has returned to expand our world view once again with new song ‘Niobe’. It’s another artistic expression that combines the musician’s classical piano training with a penchant for genre-breaking songwriting, and all wrapped up in an alluring tale of loss, grief, mental health and the surreal.
While Hide represents the cutting-edge of her country’s alternative music movement, for this new work, she’s turned to the classics for inspiration. As she explains below:
“According to Homer’s Iliad, princes Niobe had six daughters and six sons, and boasted of her progenitive superiority to the Titan Leto, who had only two children, Apollo and Artemis. As punishment for the crime of pride, Artemis killed all her daughters and Apollo all her sons, her children laying unburied for 9 days. The marvellous grotesque of Greek Mythology meets Lia Hide’s Niobe who is driven mad by the repetitive pregnancies, and the beauty standards and expectancies of her small-town society. The songs seems to spawn out of the 90s Murder Ballads (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), in an arrangement where cinematic composers Danny Elfman and Manos Hadjidak’s are combined with neo-folk brass sections and baroque pop elements.”
The off-kilter piano and quirky vocalisms evade an exact time and as such Lia Hide takes on her own Miss Havisham persona in the music video. The visual style also evokes silent movies of old, further adding to the eerie bewitchment of ‘Niobe’.
This single is set to feature on the upcoming new eight-track album The Missing Fourth Guest, produced by Lia Hide, mixed by Ian Shaw at Warmfuzz Productions, and mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering, UK. We’ll keep you in the loop until then!
Follow Lia Hide:
UNRECORDED 