Spring City’s single “Back on Our Streets”

Spring City’s single “Back on Our Streets”

I-TUNES: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/back-on-our-streets-feat-miah-noomi-annielle-single/1429035944

Spring City’s single “Back on Our Streets” underlines an universal truth about popular music – its roots often run much deeper than we imagine. The three talents propelling Spring City to global prominence, Annielle, Noomi, and Miah, grew up together in the Swedish city Malmbäck and began their public singing lives in similar fashion – the church. Not enough has been written about the influence of church and choral singing shaping some of the world’s most renowned pop and rock singers, but even a cursory exploration of the subject makes it quite clear that first discovering your vocal talents in a church setting can exert an enormous formative influence over a singer’s development.

Each of the aforementioned three singers brings a degree of individual renown to the project. Annielle has experienced national success in Sweden with her 2010 hit song “Summer Love” while Noomi pursued higher education in music, recorded a Christian pop album, and later scored a hit of her own in Sweden with 2016’s “Intoxicated”. The group’s third member, Miah, is a music educator in Sweden and unleashed her first solo release in 2017, as well as notching her own hit with the song “That’s When We All Come Falling Down”. Their single “Back on Our Streets” is an incredibly polished number, but don’t mistake it for artifice – the bright production sheen simply accentuates the song’s tremendous musicality.

The musicality centers around three primary elements – artful acoustic guitar, slightly smoky lead vocals highlighted by emotive phrasing, and gorgeous crystalline harmonies deepening the gentleness of the song. The personal and musical experiences of a lifetime are vividly reflected in the trio’s obvious chemistry and the recording merely has to capture that, but “Back on Our Streets” does so much more. It gives listeners a bountiful soundscape to lose ourselves in and radiates with a rare amount of care and consideration.

Much of that care and consideration can be heard in the song’s lyrical content. “Back on Our Streets” has genuine literary merit without ever coming off as self-indulgent or pretentious. Instead, the words further help the song to come off as intended – a highly musical, adult focused work nonetheless entertaining and brimming over with the sort of passion we expect from musical artists who perform both for the love of what they do and because they simply have to.

It’s a focused performance as well. Spring City wisely never wastes listeners’ time with elongated instrumental breaks and even hyper-critical types will be hard pressed to discover a single extraneous word in the lyrics. It’s clear Spring City entered the studio with a clear idea of what they wanted to accomplish with “Back on Our Streets” and they’ve pulled it off with immense stylishness and gravitas. It’s a soothing, enjoyable listen, to be sure, and likewise rates as one of the most substantive single releases I’ve heard this year. It’s all the more impressive when you consider Spring City only formed in March of this year and are set to soon release their first EP. “Back on Our Streets” is a tantalizing preview of greatness to come.

SHAZAM: https://www.shazam.com/track/436097852/back-on-our-streets

Mindy McCall