Grizzly Bear - Three Rings

Five years after they dropped Shields, Grizzly Bear finally gifts us new music; and Three Rings is a track that makes more evident the new ways the band is following since their last album. If they have always been a band that plays with complicated ideas and sounds, they masked them very well with folky arrangements and an almost innocent approach: their masterpiece, Veckatimest could be the music analogue to The Little Prince, an album that deals with important and heavy human issues, but presented in an alluring way that even child could love. But Shields, saw them taking a darker turn, and finally Three Rings finds a total connection between the dense ideas that have plagued the bands' discography and a complex dream-like sound.

It's a song about conflict, about a couple that follows a pattern of breaking up when they realize that they don't fit together, but that gets back together when they acknowledge that they have become essential to each other. Three Rings finds them in the moment of negotiating (pleading might be more accurate) a reconciliation: "Don't you ever leave me. Don't you ever feel it all come together", Ed Droste asking for a new opportunity for their love cycle. But the tension in the lyrics goes reflected in the music: synths flowing and reversing to create an ethereal mood, the promise of eternal love lying there, only to be confronted by a reckless percussion that doesn't follows any norm, that speeds up or calms down at its own will, but that it's always there. At the end, only the instruments remain, it's an intense crescendo that feels like an elongated moment to question what is following to ponder if it's worthy to go on. A beautiful track that keeps our expectations high on their new album.