tinvìs breaks the cycle with "Other Lives"

tinvìs gives us a powerful meditation on the cycles we can’t escape and the histories that run through our bones. With “Other Lives,” It’s a lived-in, bruised track that is ultimately emancipatory, an emotionally raw sweep of a piece from Texnia.

“Other Lives” concerns itself with the patterns we rinse and repeat, the inherited weight we carry for a time, until something finally presses us to look up at all that weight. There’s a quiet, painful ache at its core, a reckoning with the ways we bow our heads and close our eyes in “other lives,” even as something inside us knows better. The song crystallizes that tension between avoidance and consciousness, between memory and movement.

The song eases along with intentional grace. It starts in intimate openness and grows into something weepy and transcendent. That emotional swell is extended by an impressive cast of collaborators, horns, courtesy of Jon Natchez, add a satisfyingly burnished dimension to the howls and winged reaches. Eric Gardner holds down the groove on drums with delicate power, and Max Hart delivers a low-slung bassline that pulses with restrained vigor.

“Other Lives” is not only about confronting the past, but also about feeling it to the hilt, breaking that pattern, and stepping forward with open eyes. tinvìs has made a tune that not only rings out through history but also redefines it.