I feel like a quarter of the man I am. Packaged, gift wrapped and unceremoniously tossed under a random tree in the forest are my limbs. All that’s left of me is a bit of mind, a vision to peer into the distance to find the loudly colored card attached to my appendages that loudly proclaims: “Sorry, not sorry we regifted your basic humanity! Hope no rats gnawed on them in the mean time!” And you better hope you’re right in every decision you make, because you need those limbs to get moving again; and if you chase the one misnomer red herring leaf amongst the mountain of milquetoast mauve that is the forest at night, shit can go awry. You’re always vulnerable without your arms to fight and your legs to run: you might go rolling down the mountain side or you’re a meal.

Give yourself a break: after all, you’re just a head trying to clamber its way out of a life combustion. Movement takes fucking time to think.

(BUY ON ITUNES)

But there isn’t silence as you stare down your strategy, something Mira, Un Lobo! knows all too well. You’re not standing still in life, you’re ‘”drifting, [trying to] hold on”. You only move every time your face hits the ground and you have a bit of breath to blow into the dirt bouncing you a few metres ahead. They aren’t big steps, but each one matters. Rocking against life takes some energy when you’ve been reduced to a mote; but you can’t focus only on the march, you still have emotions. And they’re drifting to the surface like dead bodies every time the wind shifts you.

Unlike nearly all anthems, Mira, Un Lobo!’s track gets that sometimes re-conquering life is not about wearing your warrior face and moving across the battlefield, it’s about having the strength to make the inward turn into your head. Even the best anthems forget that even though you’re ballyhooing back at life the reason you’re shouting into the air is because you want to forget your crisis showers you in shame. The inspiration behind this track—the ‘person’ that wrote that gift card and hacked your limbs—was the economic crisis that massacred Mira, Un Lobo! in one fell swoop into of the—as the government sees them—the mangled masses of the unemployed.

This is where Mira, Un Lobo!’s project makes its reimagining of the anthem shine. Some problems we aren’t shouting out to the rest of the world about how brave of a face we have and how ‘we will OVERCOME!’ Because waving your Achilles heel like a bloody wound —that food could definitely be a worry—attracts hungry expectations of strength from others onto you.

Which is why I imagine Mira, Un Lobo! took a look at anthems and thought that though even on the toughest terrains a person will eventually run into another human—there are 7 billion of us wandering things—that you should keep a plastered positivity on your face to not shoo a helping heart with your real misery is a fool’s errand. Shame is so othering that when you do see each other in the forest, even though you’re both human, you’ll think: “Look a Wolf!” because they have the potential to devour your world.

That’s too much to carry when you don’t have shoulders to place your head on, so this track shuts out the world through headphones and showers you in brilliant synth work allowing space for the screams in your head to give way to Serotonin, a true calm absent the rapid gasps you’d mistaken as breathing. As the artist puts it, Serotonin allows him to find being awake not a distraction from hiding under the sheets, using sleep as a numbing agent, but rather a time to face down “adversities, oblivious to any consequences”. Serotonin makes solid the fact that if an opportunity comes to move towards your legs that breath out of the dirt will be planned, not some repressed sigh fucking it all up when it matters most.

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