Brand New Day by The Muster Point Project is a song that takes a bit of time to settle on your skin. But when it does, the truth is that it embeds like few songs can. In an age where music is churned out for clickbait reactions, the organic feel of this self-recorded track will take you by surprise.
With a well-rounded set of collaborators, Kevin Franco and his TMPP collective show us that it is possible to create something that is both raw and intimate, while also being universally recognizable. Not an easy task, but they pull it off with the aplomb of an experienced creator and a team that clearly respects and challenges each other. A rare thing in our reality these days.
Musically, Brand New Day is a complex beast hiding behind a disarmingly simple songwriting aesthetic. The directness of three well-written verses underpin the broader complexities of this beautifully haunting indie folk composition. The weight of the regular that holds up the illusion of the extraordinary in our lives seems to have settled here as a timeless reverberation.
Much of this weight is due to the well-paced instrumental choices that make you return to the track again and again, the soft yet insistent gravitational pull of TMPP’S Brand New Day. Marcelo Effori’s drumming gives the song a profound consistency, while Oleg Pisarenko’s piano intertwines with lyrics that build steadily, and take us along for a ride. Yet, for me, the element that really sold it was the guitar solo. Because, while most bands in the last decade would keep your attention with synth after synth after endless chorus with the barest attention to musical development, TMPP take their time.
And it works so well. The extended development in the second half of the song leads to a moment of musical triumph that is worth the wait: the moment when all vocal hooks and layer upon layer of extended guitar melodies crash upon you to form an almost cathedral-like wall of sonic proportions that is at once both very BIG, and very much you.
Brand New Day is the type of song that doesn’t feel like it is selling itself, doesn’t oversell itself, doesn’t oversell life. It is life-affirming in that most rare of ways: it is real about the difficulties, but true in its hope. That is the thing about Brand New Day; it sticks with you long after the music ends.