There’s an interesting arrangement concept at work here that I’ve been hearing quite a bit amongst all the bedroom-pop artists and Eilish-a-likes recently. The basic idea is to avoid building your rhythm around bright percussion or cymbals (as pop, rock, and EDM tracks often would), but instead to fill that arrangement niche with a variety of distortion artefacts instead, effectively leaving the kick and maybe a ponderous backbeat to drive the rhythm along. (Yes, you might get a few little bursts of high-frequency energy in some of the hits, but with negligible frequency-masking impact – check out my critique of Miley Cyrus’s 'Midnight Sky' for more on that tactic.)

There are two main advantages this approach has going for it, in my view. Firstly, it means you can get loads of devil-may-care attitude from your extravagantly distorted tones (especially on monophonic bass instruments that don’t generate too much actual harmonic complexity), but at the same time you can keep those timbres comparatively smooth-sounding tonally because there’s nothing competing with them in the HF region – it’s not like in a rock track, where the guitars have to sound aggressive at the high end to fend off masking effects from the drummer’s cymbals. And this leads to the second advantage, which is that you don’t then have to massively thin out the lead vocals to get them to cut through an HF arms race. As such, the singer’s timbre can remain fuller and closer – and hence more emotionally compelling as a result. Would you be surprised to discover that such a canny production has Finneas’s fingerprints all over it? Me neither…

Another thing to listen out for here is the subtle way the reverb’s dropped out in the background to highlight specific words near the start of the song. Specifically, check out the lyrics “dig deep” at 0:26 and “inside” at 0:35, under both of which the persistent cloud of background reverb is suddenly muted for a fraction of a second. Now, as engineers, we’ve learnt to recognise the mechanics of what’s going on (it’s especially audible if you solo the stereo Sides signal), but the wider listening public simply don’t notice that kind of thing directly. All they notice is that the voice somehow inexplicably darts towards them fleetingly, or momentarily seems to subtly shift into tighter focus.

For a hack that can subliminally play with the listener’s mind like this, muting reverbs is almost insulting straightforward, yet it always amazes me how few project-studio users take proper advantage of it. Try it on your next project – you might just fall in love!