Mantaraybryn's break-up banger 'Five Minutes'

With his lauded Year Of The Heron EP still casting light from its release over a year ago, Cornish/Welsh pop maestro, Manataraybryn is back with new music for the first time in 2022 as the out-and-out pop of Five Minutes arrives with curled lip and broken heart. Pairing desperation of a romantic roadblock with big, cathartic melodies, the intense confessional slots easily into the best of new pop traditions: the ugly, life-altering end of a romantic relationship framed in the defiant tones of a once-bitten, never shy love survivalist.

Intimate and honest, Five Minutes spells out the uncomfortable desperation that arrives without welcome when at least one half knows that the party is definitively over. Yet, with memories of the good times lingering in a hangover haze, Mantaraybryn’s vulnerable vocal sings of the other side, lost in wanting to claw back time, just to see whether it might all turn out differently.

Mantaraybryn says of the single: "Ironically, after we finished the track, I met the person I’m writing about and it was clear I didn’t need that relationship again, but I got a pop song from the process. I feel like I’ve always been making pop music, but recently shaken off any of the weird snobbery around it. This feels like my first confident pop song. I’m always going to be inspired by that intersection of great vocals and dance-meets-indie-meets-pop, and I hope that comes across in this track."

Five Minutes is released with a new video, filmed, produced and edited by Jordan Wallace, a surreal collage of clips that range from being concretely literal interpretations of the lyrics to oblique mythical and pop culture references.

Mantaraybryn has been releasing music and performing live since his 2016 debut album Dark Shapes In The Water, a self-released album that caught the prevailing winds of intimate electro-pop appreciation and hit several million streams on Spotify. He has since seen fans eye-to-eye on sold-out UK tours, most recently and notably taking to the stage of Birmingham Pride 2022 as headliner.

Originally from Cornwall but now a long-term resident of Cardiff, the sea air is in Mantaraybryn's blood. He draws lyrical inspiration from the natural world around him, but also from tales of folklore and magic, sorcery and mythology. Musically, he claims inspiration from the pop princess elite, including Kate Bush, Robyn, Florence and The Machine and Roisin Murphy.