Premiere: Neil MacLeod - 'Fear'

Emerging New Zealand singer-songwriter, producer, engineer, and artist continues his ascent with a cinematic new cut of electronic pop alongside a mysterious and entrancing video - take a first watch

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Image credit: Supplied

We’ve been big fans of New Zealand’s Neil MacLeod for a little while now, premiering a few remixes lifted from his We Have Known Last Days Remixed EP a little while ago. Now, Neil welcomes his new era with his latest single, the enchanting sounds of Fear, which alongside its visualiser are premiering on Pilerats today ahead of its March 15 release.

Celebrating a decade of releasing music, with MacLeod first uploading music to Soundcloud 10 years ago, this milestone is made all the more impressive by the fact that Neil is only just 24 years old. Drawing on all of his experience thus far, MacLeod’s latest composition opens with atmospheric synths and string plucks Neil’s ethereal vocals, before tastefully booming kick drums and snarling bass lines enter the mix. Slowly building across the track’s just over three minute runtime, MacLeod manages to pack a few aural twists in a poppy song length.

“Like many people, I’ve allowed fear to influence my life,” says MacLeod. “At one stage, I developed quite a fearful relationship with my dreams. I’d been exploring dream interpretation and lucid dreaming and found myself increasingly anxious about going to sleep. In retrospect, I can see that I was just too close and obsessed with the whole thing. I was reading meaning into my dreams without any help or support, and it was messing with my sense of reality. I’m someone who relentlessly seeks self improvement, and at times I think this mentality can create more problems than it solves - such as how my relationship to dreams ended up. This song gets into all of that. In essence, it’s exploring the fear that I might lose myself on the journey to finding myself.”

Placing a high level of importance on the imagery associated with a song, the video for Fear provides a peculiar and mystifying visual accompaniment, featuring sharp 3D imagery depicting (what appears to be) a floating rock or meteorite type object suspended in space and emitting a strange substance.

Speaking on the visual element, Neil explains “The video is an introduction to the wider visual world of my next EP ‘I Need a Battle’. The floating object you see is a vessel, from which reflective, gooey black liquid escapes. These are symbols which play an important part in the story. For now, simply soak it up.”

Soak up Fear a few days ahead of release: