It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Emi Night, the folk musician who puts out music under the name Strawberry Runners. Their In The Garden, In The Night EP landed on our 2017 best-of list and since then the only thing they’ve put out was a collection of demos in 2021. Today, she’s released a new single, “Circle, Circle,” which kicks off a new chapter for Strawberry Runners. It’s a lovely, hypnotic track that builds as it goes, as Night espouses on the cyclical nature of life. Check it out below.

Here is Night’s statement on the track:

“Circle Circle” is a song I wrote one delirious evening while I was sick with a fever – experiencing cyclical thoughts, rumination, and anxiety during the strange waking hours illness brings. The song, the consistent melody and rhythm, felt like a lifeline of certainty through the existential dread of fever dreams.

Writing this song, I gleaned a new understanding of the transmuting power music carries. It’s difficult to describe, but if you’ve ever felt at sea in the midst of a disorienting transformation, and can imagine that through torrents of emotion you find a pillar of stability to cling to, to climb and gain your bearings, to witness the whole stormy sea thrashing about without being swept up in its current – that’s a bit how music began to feel to me while writing this song.

The song’s lyrics illustrate a search for meaning in a lifetime of disparate moments that can feel both monumental and insignificant, and maintaining curiosity in what can be simultaneously a mundane, cruel, chaotic, lonely, and beautiful world.

Musically, I wanted to create a song that would evoke the sensation of climbing a mildly sloped but deceptively long hill on an old road bike during a spring day, plodding ever upward over false peaks: the slow start, the frenetic frustration, the eventual surrender into the groove, the sensation of never quite reaching the destination, but finding purpose + strength in little joys along the way.

Michael Cormier O’Leary helped me arrange the song, drawing inspiration from the music of Virginia Astley. He played many of the parts, providing a playfully off-kilter synth backdrop and a curious, meandering solo to the persistent, if idiosyncratic rhythm.

The music video begins with three tarot cards that set the tone for the song’s meaning. It continues using match-cutting to tie seemingly random circular objects to key lyrics, related memories, and each other. This technique was championed by the editor, Santi Slade, who punctuated the music’s rhythmic movements in his edits. I gathered the footage and we worked together to find a balance of humor and candor in pairings.

“Circle, Circle” is out now via Duper Moon Records.