Melbourne artist Fractures has just shared a stunning cover of the summer pop hit Eastside by Benny Blanco, Halsey and Khalid.
Mark Zito replaces the pop vibes with an emotional soundscape of dreamy, excitable, and ever-so-slightly sad electronic sounds. Zito’s falsetto rattles over synths and layered guitar melodies; his voice, like his music, is both sweet and dark.
Fractures has released a cover of Benny Blanco, Halsey and Khalid’s smash pop hit Eastside, transforming it into a sweet electronic ballad.
You can barely hear the Halsey hit that’s played through your radio for the past few months. It’s not the same song you would belt out with your friends at the start of a road trip, it’s the one that would send you into warm nostalgia at the end of a long drive.
Zito is a big fan of Khalid’s music, and mentions that the cover came about organically.
“I found myself getting lost in Khalid’s work… to redesign someone else’s work, work with which you already have a great appreciation, is always a risky prospect so I can only hope I did it justice but I know I’m happy with it and thankful the song exists,” Zito says.
Fractures’ debut album Still Here was released in 2017, a deeply personal record written mostly in an isolated house on the Mornington Peninsula. The album battles with emotions, relationships and the way the mind works, the vocal harmonies and rich production mimicking different emotional states.
He has since released a number of singles, including Sculptures, which Billboard called “haunting, ethereal”, and Dawn, which is an intricate instrumental track somehow both hopeful and gloomy at the same time.
Sculptures is the first song Fractures released since signing to the FADER label, a tune he dropped just last month.
Some of Zito’s music – the soft ringing falsetto and experimental folk sound such as that of Sculptures – and the way he produces his music by hiding away for long periods of time, has often led to comparisons with Bon Iver.
In 2017, Zito told Happy, “I think it’s pretty obvious that there are some songs that Bon Iver has influenced, but unfortunately as soon as you start singing in a falsetto these days people just assume you’re a copying him.”
Sculptures and Eastside are out now.
