Circuit des Yeux went fully orchestral for last year’s -io, but the new outtake Haley Fohr is sharing today forgoes that sound in favor of acoustic guitar and brushed drums. It’s called “The Manatee,” and it’s about her encounter with a manatee almost exactly two years ago today.

Fohr explains:

At 4:30 A.M. on February 4th, 2020 a manatee popped out of the sea and stared directly at me. It was a charged 10 seconds. The experience stuck with me so much that I wrote a song about it.

The music video (directed by Rudy Rubio) is a depiction of my own kind of manatee. I play a wet sea creature trying to make it work in a dry-land society. It is inspired by the scientific understanding that the manatee crawled into the ocean 50,000,000 years ago. The manatee is my reminder that intuition and two legs might be all a person needs to find a more hospitable world — perhaps an undiscovered place to call home.

Watch director Rudy Rubio’s video below.