I dated a guy last year who was genuinely great at seeming open. Warm, present, always happy to see me. Three months in I asked him directly what he was actually feeling about us. We were sitting on his couch and he smiled at me the way he always did and said “I’m good, you’re good, we’re good.” I sat there for a second processing the fact that I had asked a real question and gotten a goddamn weather report back. That smile was the whole problem. He’d give you just enough warmth to make leaving feel wrong, and then you’d realize hours later that you still couldn’t say what he actually thought about anything. It took me another month to understand that the warmth was the whole strategy, which is a fucked up thing to figure out about someone you genuinely liked. You could go looking for the real version of him all day and come back empty-handed every time, and the shit that really got me was that he kept the door open just enough to make you think you were almost there. That is the specific trap Remington Super 60 is writing about on ‘Time to Breathe,’ and Elisabeth Thorsen sells it like someone who’s been sitting on that same couch asking that same unanswered question.
The production is worth getting into first because it’s doing serious work here. Christoffer Schou recorded this in his living room surrounded by guitars and basses and his collection of 1980s Casio and Yamaha toy keyboards that he says have been shaping the project’s sound for years. That sounds like a gloriously chaotic setup on paper. It is the opposite of chaotic in practice. The bassline running through ‘Time to Breathe’ is groovy as hell in a way that feels almost unfair given how sad the words are, and Elisabeth Thorsen’s vocals float over everything like she’s half-asleep and half-done trying. That combination has no business being this good. It is.
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She opens the song where the feeling actually lives. “It feels like were going nowhere now / Strangers yet close somehow.” The whole confession is right there. You’re physically in the same space as someone and emotionally miles out, and nobody’s saying anything because naming it might end it. I have been in that apartment. I have had that silence. It is fucking suffocating in a way that’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t lived it.
Then comes the line that got me. “You hide yourself behind your smile / always try to hide, something.” The ‘something’ dropped at the end like she can’t even finish the thought is doing real emotional work. She knows he’s hiding something and she’s been watching his face long enough to see that the smile is a door that stays shut and she’s tired of knocking.
Then the bridge arrives and the whole thing gets genuinely raw. “So do you want me? Cause I cant tell if / I’m just wasting my time.” That’s not a dramatic confrontation. That’s someone who’s been patient for too long finally running out of it. The exhaustion in that line is real as shit and Elisabeth’s delivery doesn’t oversell a damn thing which is why it works the way it does. She sounds actually tired – there’s this low-grade I’ve-been-here-too-long energy in her voice and it’s kind of devastating to sit with.
Then she does something in the chorus I genuinely wasn’t expecting. “I need some time to breathe / you’re too hard to reach / got to find myself again. “ She’s telling herself she needs to step back and remember who she was before she started burning all her energy trying to decode someone who refuses to be decoded. That is a genuinely mature move wrapped in a groove that makes you want to move your whole body. The production never lets the sadness get too heavy, which somehow makes the sadness hit harder.
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She closes it out in the most honest place possible – “I don’t wanna see you now / don’t wanna feel anything about you / I tried to make you see something / now I’m just wondering what to do.” She tried. She actually tried to make him understand whatever it was she needed him to understand and now she’s standing in the aftermath trying to figure out what the next move is. That is not closure. That’s the messy middle of a decision that hasn’t fully been made yet, and it’s an honest as hell place to end a song. Most people would’ve cleaned it up. Remington Super 60 left it raw and they were right to.
Remington Super 60 is a Norwegian indie pop project out of Fredrikstad, built from the ground up by songwriter and bedroom producer Christoffer Schou. He started the whole thing in late 1998 as a Casio pop experiment, and the debut album was called ‘pling 2001.’ The sound has moved around since then though always rooted in Christoffer’s musical obsessions – Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, the Velvet Underground, and newer reference points like New Order, Stereolab, High Llamas, Cornelius, and Yo La Tengo. The current lineup is Christoffer, Elisabeth Thorsen, and Magnus Abelsen. They’re releasing on Christoffer’s own Café Superstar Recordings, licensed through the Spanish label Ventilador Music. That this whole gorgeous, groovy, quietly devastating thing came out of a living room in Norway is the kind of information that makes me feel genuinely good about what people do with a bedroom and a bunch of old keyboards.
I stopped going back to that couch I mentioned earlier eventually. It took longer than it should have but I got there. The door he kept open just enough turned out to be a very easy one to finally walk out of once I stopped believing I was almost through it. Remington Super 60 closes ‘Time to Breathe’ in that same place, the messy, unresolved, finally-done-waiting place. That’s the whole song.
