Today, genre blending artist Ethan Healy – known by his last name – announces his all encompassing third album Force Of Nature, out July 18th. Depictions of young love, hardships, and nostalgia are wrapped in a gorgeous 8-track project that breathes new life into the musicians’ electronic and R&B influenced catalog. Healy shares a taste of the new record with “SELFISH,” out now via BMG.
The lush, languorous “SELFISH” was inspired, in part, by an episode of Friends in which Chandler Bing tries to get his ex Janice back, only for her to choose her family in the end. About the song Healy reflected, “This was the first time I had ever worked on recorded music with my band. We’ve been playing together for close to 8 years, and I think that synergy shines on ‘Selfish’. Their involvement really pushed me to be more musical and intentional.”
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO “SELFISH”
CLICK HERE TO PRE-SAVE FORCE OF NATURE
The announce comes off the heels of his first new song in over two years, released last month, “RUNNING LAPS.” The song is an earnest indie-alternative meditation on self-introspection — and a yearning of how to escape the habits that can pull you back down.
The album sees a natural evolution for the artist with over 200M+ catalog streams, a SZA stamp of approval, and a Cautious Clay collab under his belt. He takes the buoyant indie-pop melded with groovy R&B and hip-hop sounds he’s become known for and amplifies it with production by Austin Daniel Brown (Doechii, Amine, Isaiah Rashad, Jordan Ward, Joyce Wrice and Duckwrth) and Public Library Commute, as well as Harrison Finks on organ and pedal steel, Ben Callicott on guitar, Ali Abu-Khraybeh on keys, and guest vocalist Hailey Knox.
Force Of Nature album artwork
FORCE OF NATURE TRACKLISTING:
- HELL OR HIGH WATER
- RUNNING LAPS
- GET UP TO GET DOWN
- SELFISH
- THE BREEZE
- EARTHQUAKES
- PICK ME UP (FEAT. HAILEY KNOX)
- THIRTEEN
Picture a terrarium: a bright green, lush self-sustaining ecosystem that encompasses all the elements — a world inside your palm. Healy’s third album, Force of Nature, is the aural equivalent of that. A pulsing, gorgeous suite of eight tracks replete with thunder, shifting tectonic plates, and young love. “I always wanted to pull music out of this electronic, computer-produced space, and really breathe life into it,” the Memphis musician says. “I want my music to be this expanding, kind of contracting thing — alive.”
A native son of Memphis, Tennessee, Healy grew up in the eye of a musical hurricane — hymns bouncing off the church walls where his mom sang in the choir and soul legends like Earth, Wind & Fire soundtracking family dinners. After his parents split, though, Healy retreated further into his music — vibing out to Laurel Canyon songwriters and Southern rap alike — while noodling on his guitar into the wee hours. And although he attended medical school for physical therapy (inspired by a torn ACL), he spent the summer before college traveling and making music, dropping his Three 6 Mafia-interpolating single “$150 / roll widdit” via Spotify in 2015. “For the next three years during school, I wielded these two things — almost just like it was, my yin and yang,” he says of music and medicine.
And while he did graduate, Healy often skipped classes to work on what would become his debut, self-released album, 2017’s Subluxe — crafted between classes and trips to the cadaver lab. That album has gone on to garner 200M+ streams, its lead single, “Reckless” (RIAA certified Gold) becoming a viral sound on TikTok in 2019. After signing to RCA in 2018, Healy decamped to L.A. to become a full-time musician, dropping his first major label record, 2021’s Tungsten, with the support of SZA and Khalid. His debut EP, Look at God, followed in 2023 (featuring Cautious Clay and The Imports).
Force of Nature, then, is the next natural evolution for Healy. “It wanted it to sound alive and immediate and real,” Healy says of the record, which merges R&B, rap, indie rock, and something ineffably him. Take the sensual, serpentine opener “HELL OR HIGH WATER,” which Healy says is about how he was “drowning in doubt about my life, my relationship. I just had a moment where I wanted life to stop throwing me around. So that song, it feels like meditation on belief. It feels like hope to me.”
The groovy “GET UP TO GET DOWN” (featuring The Imports) follows, dancing us away from the gloom. “I wanted it to feel like a starling flying, a murmuration, being taken up and taken up,” Healy says. “Bad times are going to happen, but so are good times — the cycle is just going to repeat.”
And then nostalgic, gorgeous “THE BREEZE” blows in, written about the aftermath of 2003’s Hurricane Elvis — and a lost love. The country-tinged “EARTHQUAKES” is the opposite side of the coin — at least sonically. “It’s almost like two people in a relationship, equated to the tectonic plates, buckling and quivering and becoming misaligned,” Healy says.
“PICK ME UP” is a slice of R&B sweetness featuring the slinky vocals of Hailey Knox — and an awakening of sorts. “It’s playing on the trope of thinking that your reality is the true reality,” Healy says. “But then you get this second perspective, and you’re shining light on your shortcomings and misgivings.” In the end, though, it’s back to Memphis — Healy’s home — with a simple, raw cover of Big Star’s classic ode to teenage love, “THIRTEEN.” “That one screams home to me,” Healy says. “And this album is, in a sense, a hero’s journey type thing — starting at home with ‘Hell or High Water’ and traveling between my other homes of L.A., and, now, Brooklyn, where I live sandwiched between church bells. With this song, we find our way back home.”
And what a home it is — tempests, sunshine, monsoons, and soft breezes, Force of Nature is just that. A world in itself. A universe of sound.
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