Track of the Day: Manyana - 'TTCP'

Emerging duo Manyana have released their brand new track 'TTCP', taken from their forthcoming debut album NTM, which will land on April 20th.

Since lockdown 2020, Aran Sheehy has spent any extra free time available working on his own artistic venture, writing and recording an album with David O'Rourke.

Sheehy had spent his earlier years as a drummer - and Dave a guitarist - but since moving onto this project the pair have both begun to dabble heavily in electronic music. The idea initially was to make Manyana a four-piece touring band, but Sheehy and O'Rourke struggled to find like-minded artists with the needed commitment level. Deciding to go it alone, Manyana haven't looked back since, with their creative output increasing astronomically since narrowing it down to two people.

'TTCP' is an expansive track full of push and pull sounds, captivating synths and distant background vocal snippets. Building up to a hypnotic bassline, the track has an energy that's easy to get totally lost in.

"TTCP is a network throughput test in Linux - it's to test to see if you have made a connection - if you are transmitting data - our idea was that this was someone looking up to the moon trying to make a connection which doesn't resolve (in the same way the lyrics don't, becoming a repetition of 'to the moon') meaning an ongoing signal going out to space, indefinitely unanswered," Sheehy tells Hot Press of the track's origins.

Artistically, NTM is a conceptual double-album which tells of a dystopian near future where many of today's societal anxieties have come to pass, with climate change in particular being a recurring motif.

"It's quite an album of it's time really. We had started it before Covid, but the bulk of the work has been done in the last 12 months," Aran says.

"We have only actually seen each other once in that time period, so its creation came primarily from remote sessions and sharing projects. This was quite surreal really, while initially we thought that might have been a kind of roadblock, it has actually challenged us both to cross ground we may not have attempted to before, and ultimately the end product has far exceeded what we both hoped it could when starting the project."

Manyana have a few incoming tricks up their sleeve for their listenership, with their ambitions showing no signs of waning this year, despite the ongoing COVID restrictions halting live music and entertainment.

"We have a really exciting project coming up to be released in tandem with the album in which we have collaborated with a lot of really talented Irish visual artists," Aran adds.

"Apart from that, there will certainly be a gig or two on the horizon, although it really is anybody's guess how far that horizon is away for all of us."

Listen to 'TTCP' below: