Once the solo project of New Zealand singer-songwriter Hollie Fullbrook, Tiny Ruins has since evolved into a full band with Tom Healy on guitar, Cass Basil on bass, and Alex Freer on drums. Their upcoming album Olympic Girls is their third full-length but first official US release, and we’ve already head two songs from it, early single “How Much” and the record’s title track. Now they’ve shared a third, the hauntingly beautiful “School Of Design.” Fullbrook explains:

The lyrics came from a real experience where I did find myself wandering around an empty design school in a foreign city while on tour. That’s where the imagery of the fresh white paint on the walls and the ‘archives’ comes from, as that’s what I saw there. I wrote the song maybe two years later. You draw from experiences to articulate other feelings, other thoughts…a cinematic image that you know well is used to give life to something else, another feeling altogether.

It’s a song about systems, about the confining nature of systems, and wanting to find a new way. It was written quickly, and I loved the guitar part from the get go, but I resisted its lyrics for a while – I felt it was too similar to another song of mine — “Me At The Museum, You In The Wintergardens” which is also about an institution, and about escaping from regimented regime. But in the end, I became happy with it.

Listen below.

Olympic Girls is out 2/1 on Milk!/Ba Da Bing/Marathon Artists/Ursa Minor. Pre-order it here.

CREDIT: Jenna Todd