In its meaning and isolated conception, the song, which she teased at that early March show, happens to feel like an appropriate mascot for lockdown. 'It’s about taking the time to let the understanding forge underground.' 'It’s about waiting to understand more before talking about it - when the meaning is still below the clavicle and hasn’t made it up to the head yet,' she said. The song embodies the restless feeling of letting a complex situation unfold without intervening prematurely. Her new single, 'Below the Clavicle,' out today, is the first track that came to fruition in that dreamlike environment. 'For the first month, I hardly interacted with anyone.' I had never had time to work and write so uninterrupted –– until now in quarantine, of course,' she said. 'I had never been so alone and still as I was during this period. “I thought about feelings like magma pushing up through the crust of the earth,” she told office. She slept in a room with a view of the Pyrenees mountains, dusty yellow wildflowers and dogs running around off-leash. She spent the time writing her next album, contemplating volcanoes and the formation of stone and mountains and how those elements of nature reflect her inner world.

Between Paris Fashion Week appearances and tours, Drewchin spent the fall doing a residency with FUGA in Zaragoza, Spain. The acoustic work is a return to her roots. But there was an underlying feeling that where she was going in song was so deep that she couldn’t fully bring us there without cracking open. Everyone was transfixed and charmed with her candor. She’d start a song and start it over, pausing to burp or commenting on how beautiful the call and response she coordinated was. When she began her own set, she said a lot of people were excited to hear the glitchy dance soundscape of 'Trinity,' her 2019 full-length mixtape that ushered a larger cohort into her complex, experimental sonic world –– an accessible album that she says “felt like water, just purely quenching for as many people as possible.” But that night, she’d be playing vulnerable, pared down acoustic material. The artist, whose given name is Alexandra Drewchin, stood in the crowd, all circled around a small clearance for the stage while string duo LEYA debuted their new record she joined them for their last two songs off “Angel Lust,” on which she features. Crowded into a residential loft alongside at least 200 other people, sweaty, shoulder to shoulder, drinking PBR’s, it was the last public gathering untainted with paranoia over physical closeness that many of us would get to enjoy for months. A week before New York City began its incremental lockdown, Eartheater headlined a packed show at an intimate DIY space in Brooklyn.

Freak on a leash songster