Atka, the London-based German musician, songwriter, and producer has shared “Lenny,” a new single off of her forthcoming debut EP, The Eye Against The Ashen Sky, out November 3. Of the song, Atka notes “This is a song about how one man’s tunnel-visioned obsession with finding meaning turns everything around him into a swamp of meaninglessness that also sucks in everyone around him. It’s witnessing empty repetition right in front of your eyes and the helplessness and all-limbs-dropping-to-the-floor exhaustion felt as a result, when caring for someone who is depressed. And ultimately it’s about the absence of being perceived by that person and one’s drift into a ghost-like state. When no one is watching or sees me – do I even exist? Lenny is about “reverse-paranoia” if you want it.”

On the EP, the musician now processes this academic debate through storytelling in a close, tangible manner. Here, intellectual interests and personal experiences blur into an autobiographical work about shame and paranoia. Track after track, The Eye Against The Ashen Sky meanders deeper and deeper through various manifestations of these emotional worlds to their origin in the overwhelming gaze of the Other. The tracks were produced primarily with modular and analogue synthesizers and guitars in the South-London home studio of Jung Kim, the lead guitarist of the band Gang of Youths and Stephen Sedgwick, the trusted mixer/sound engineer of the Gorillaz, Damon Albarn and Blur mixed the record.

Photo Courtesy: JSD