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Yuna Sings Ode To Malaysia In Latest Single

The launch of the latest single, expected to feature on the 4th studio album, has marked the beginning of yet another artistic milestone for Yuna. We recalled the last we’ve heard of the soulful songstress when she released her 3rd studio album ‘Chapters’ in 2016. Back then, she was already charting a formidable, yet unorthodox personality — a progression and creative growth that has profoundly evolved symbolizing the YUNA we see today. With a broad smile coupled with a strong and colourful fashion sense and voice uniquely her own, she went on to empower others in her art channeling modestly an increasing confidence every single time she launches an album.

Los Angeles-based Malaysian singer-songwriter, Yuna, is professionally known for embracing, in her earliest creative career as a prominent artists, an eclectic R&B sound with heavy influences of the East that is fast becoming a formidable cultural prominence in R&B worldwide.

“I wanted to feature Perlis because it’s where I spent most of my childhood and I wanted to show how beautiful it was and still is, and how untouched by modernisation, which I love very much”.

Yuna

‘Forevermore’ provides a foretaste to an album brewing a forthcoming desire for renewed optimism.  

The teasers released in snapshots and video formats clearly juxtaposed the modern and the old, and divulged little of what was truly coming. The colour and light reveal a nostalgic playfulness of the 80s via a ten-second preliminary video introduction of what was later known, characteristically, as the driving beat for the entire single; the drumming of a Malay ‘kompang’ that foreshadows the arrival of the song name in four languages.

Equally prominent as the stark lyrics that follows, the beginning scene, as fleeting as it is, marks a  rather unusual prologue. Albeit its deafening silence magnified only by the rumbling generator lighting an old petrol station, chirping crickets, and an almost horror-like display of a first generation Proton Saga, the instant yet powerful blip set a shift, an evolving composure and engineered visual identity that, almost instantly, identify with its audience.

“We wanted to show Malaysia in a different way – not the way that you see in travel videos. We wanted to showcase the unfiltered, quirky and raw beauty of the mundane like an old petrol station, a sundries shop in a rural village, the motorcycle culture (Mat Rempit) that is often stigmatised by society, and older Malaysians who have seen experienced changes to their hometown throughout the years.”

At the root of it all, ‘Forevermore’ is Yuna’s personal ode or ‘syair’, described as a type of traditional Malay poetry, depicted through the eyes and memories of a childhood growing up in Malaysia; in lush countryside scenery and vividly eloquent and culturally aesthetic people. Its fluid lyricism accompanied by vivid imagery — a dedication to her childhood memories — provide a glimpse of the beautiful past that remains a powerful force that drives an assuring future.

To witness the whiplash contrast between the musical creativity, and the palatial power of the lyrics, the creators have introduced new elements of exoticism merging detail cultural references from Malaysia intertwining scenes from Stadium Shah Alam, the ‘Mat Rempit’ motorcycle culture, an old school ‘kedai runcit’ or sundry shop, and lush countryside with modern pop and R&B elements.

Shot entirely in Malaysia, the video is produced by 33.3 Creative, directed by Adam Sinclair and alongside a seasoned team including Edwin Raj, Samuel Lam, Rabbani Sujak, Haida Yusoff and Karma Raines.

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