Premiere: Flower Drums' Aden Senycia starts solo project, first single w/ Nicholas Allbrook

If you're familiar with the depths of Perth's music world over the last decade, then there's a strong chance Flower Drums are amongst your favourite bands. Although now based in Melbourne, the duo were once one of West Australia's formidable acts; their dream-pop sound - carved years before the sound hit commercial success through Australian musicians - always feeling forward-thinking and defining of the city's musical next generation, despite playing with sounds that often came laden with nostalgia and influences from the past, the duo bringing old, distinctive sounds forward into the then-current day.

Over the last few years, the duo have remained active (they shared a full album back in 2018, and another single in 2019) but today, one-half the duo - Aden Senycia, whose often found in the production chair - is launching his own solo project, with Munik being a place for the musician's creativity to thrive away from the limitations from the main project, and away from the restrictions of his work as a usual producer, where his discography spans from Body Type and Dianas right through to POND's Nicholas Allbrook.

That final relationship with the brilliant Fremantle group frontman is an important one. It's a close-knit collaborational partnership that's synonymous with the community-built aspects of Perth's (and particularly Fremantle's) music sphere, and that with the launch of the Munik project today, gains another chapter, with Nicholas Allbrook jumping up to help launch the project and introduce the Senycia's woozy, more electronic-tinged solo work that comes with a tonne of excitement and promise for the future.

Titled Kmart, the single comes after a bit of a reflection period for Aden Senycia, who felt trapped working at his retail job with nowhere else to go. "I started writing Kmart late one night after finishing a shift at a retail store, the concept of customer loyalty cards spinning me down into existential dread," he says on the single. "I wasn't working at Kmart to be clear, the name came along later when Nick added at staggered suedo-rap vocal section, inspired by cut-up advertisements. He wasn't aware of the origin of the song but it worked out just right, as has been my experience with Nick when working with him in the past."

The final result is a woozy, genre-bending exploration of Munik's influences and production skillset, with shimmering melodies creating a distinctive new edge to that Flower Drums-familiar dream-pop sound that, with the addition of Allbrook, moves into a psychedelic-meets-jazz-rap space that's really unlike anything we've heard recently.

There's a full, five-track EP on the way from Munik with plenty more to come in the future, but in the meantime, introduce yourself to the project by jumping into its debut single Kmart below:

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