Brother Dolly – “As I Fall I Feel Alive”

Brother Dolly’s latest track “As I Fall I Feel Alive” takes its inspiration from Puerto Rican boxer Paul Bamba, specifically that suspended moment between receiving a knockout blow and hitting the canvas. It’s a genuinely strange thing to build a song around, and somehow they make it work.

The production is built from found sounds and samples the band made themselves, layered alongside traditional instrumentation. It’s downtempo, but it doesn’t drag and there’s a quiet electricity running underneath the whole thing, a restless energy beneath the slow pace that keeps you paying attention even when you can’t quite explain why, and the song keeps asking questions rather than just handing you answers. Do you feel free in the fall? Do you get addicted to the pain of the punch and start craving it? Do you keep going back because part of you wants to? And you can tell that these aren’t really boxing questions, they’re human ones, and the music sits comfortably inside that ambiguity without ever hammering the point home. With the stunning and expressive vocals, you can feel every lyric of the track.

Personally, this is one of the more original tracks I’ve heard in a while. The cinematic production and that strange, almost tender atmosphere underneath give it a quality that’s genuinely hard to place, and I mean that as a real compliment, not a polite one.

If you’re new to Brother Dolly, go back and listen to their debut “Transmission Number 5” before anything else. And if this track connects with you even a little, follow them now. This is clearly a project worth watching from the very beginning.