New Zealand’s Tiny Ruins releases a new single, ‘The Crab / Waterbaby’. This is the band’s first musical offering since 2019’s much lauded album, Olympic Girls.

The songs of Tiny Ruins often gift a rich visual and emotive narrative. ’The Crab / Waterbaby’ is drawn from a time-honoured walk around the coves of Little Muddy Creek aside the Mānukau Harbour. A Crab is found upturned, showing its soft belly. The songwriter sees in the Crab an experience of suffering – it’s as though everyone can see right through you, into your very innards – ‘you cannot help but speak about it’. A song about the transcendent comfort of ritual and ceremony that ‘returns you the right way’, to ‘give this day a chance’. Shimmering electric firebird guitar and minimalist verse arrangements give way to striking Philip Glass-esque strings & a bass solo resembling a scuttling crab that fluidly connects the song’s lyrical narrative.