Mellah is very pleased to share details of a new single. Habit is streaming now and launches alongside a new video shot during lockdown.
Earlier this Spring, South Londoner Mellah returned with a fizzing, oddball pop song in Family Fun. As we welcome the Summer in the most unusual of circumstances, he now introduces ‘Habit’, another telling, timely step in this clever artist’s ongoing journey. The video showcases our protagonist and his doppelgangers unwittingly but willingly causing self pain despite themselves. The video takes place in Mellah’s own home, which has been a hive of creativity throughout lockdown and may already be familiar to fans from a series of live performances streamed on Facebook, which have been viewed in their thousands.
Habit is a more sultry and sophisticated sound for Mellah than the frenetic pogoing ‘Family Fun’, but no less enticing. Bobbing and weaving through guitar licks and colourful patterns, it oscillates around its own intricacies and groove.
Mellah: “Funnily enough, Habit is about habits. Falling into the same, often harmful, cycles and vices despite knowing that the outcome will be no different from before. ‘Habit’s such a pain, pain is such a bore’. Einstein, of all people, said, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results’.
“Habits breed internal conflict, instinctively knowing what is good for you but still doing the opposite. The song is about that conflict and trying to find the courage and insight to not fear change. I don’t quite know why I know all of Einstein’s quotes but he also said ’The measure of intelligence is the ability to change’. There’s nothing permanent except change.”
On the video: “It’s a sensationalist way of characterising those parts of myself that blindly walk head first into the same detrimental cycles, and me at the centre of it all seemingly having little control over any of them. All within the confines of Covid 19”.
Habit joins Family Fun and Death, Pillage, Plunder as three very different but very moreish leftfield pop songs, positing Mellah as a canny purveyor of whip-smart, clued-up indie-pop.
Watch the self-directed video to Family Fun HERE.
Mellah will headline London’s Scala on the 11th February, his biggest show to date. Tickets are on sale now.
