As soon as you hit play on Hannah Abrams’s new track, “No Lines,” Abrams manages to lift you up to heights normally reserved for birds and airplanes. The song starts out with a single chord on the piano broken apart by a hair-width of time, which creates a ripple that slowly dissipates away into silence. But, before trailing into a sea of nothingness, Abrams comes in with a melodic hum as if soothing a sleepless baby, and, after a moment, the whole melody kicks in all at once with an electric guitar, a bass, and drums.
Singing behind Abrams throughout the song is Sean Croizier, who fills in the melodic space with his soulful echoes of lines sung by Abrams. Croizier’s slightly raspy timbre accents and contrasts Abrams’s high and clean voice in a way that blurs their lines into one cohesive harmony.
“I can imagine no lines between us / bleeding together, tie-dye unbound” were the first words that ran through my ears, setting up a colorful palate of movement in my mind. After the first verse, the track jumps into a chorus with a plumped-up melody that leaves no space for anything but the song. In the second run of the chorus, I found myself singing along to the lines, “stars keep on shining / humble are we” and “let’s dance while we can dear / wild and free.”
At the end of the chorus, where we experience more soothing “oohs” and “woahs,” the melody slowly picks up pace, grows, and shifts to a new section: “can you imagine no lines?” This little bridge breaks the lull Abrams created with the previous melody, acting as a palate cleanser before a musical break where the piano takes center stage. This crescendo soars above the song before returning to a stripped chorus where Abrams takes a moment to give new life to the words by taking them a little higher and giving them a little more time to spend in her larynx before setting them free for us to ingest. We loop back to a final chorus where Croizier gets a small line for himself, and the song finishes on “let’s dance while we can, dear.”
The message of “No Lines” is a very unifying one, as the title suggests. Every element is played and mixed together professionally into a floating blob of sound that you can stick your head into. Just as the first line states, the song feels like “tie-dye unbound.”
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