“The first half of the album is the album that was falling apart because we weren’t in therapy,” Vallis Alps producer David Ansari tells Apple Music. “The second half is the album that therapy saved.” Seattle-born Ansari and Canberra-born vocalist Parissa Tosif’s debut album almost never came to be. Three years into its creation, the Sydney-based pair’s personal and working relationship was so frayed that the duo required heavy external mediation. Cleave is so named for the word’s inherent double meaning: to ‘cleave’ can mean to cut apart or to stick together—representing the complexities of hurt and healing at the album’s core. “The first song and the last song kind of mark moments. The first song is really launching into as if you were in someone’s mind, and then being on the precipice of change. I guess the last song is the peace of reconciliation,” Tosif explains. “In between are many stages of thought; many stories, many mindsets that people go through when they’re letting go of the past and growing and evolving. In terms of our friendship, the process itself was really the journey—and the songs went from being half-finished without us being united to us being united and being able to bring them to their true place.” Below, the pair share insight into the delicate humanism behind every track on Cleave. “Set It Off, Set It Right” David Ansari: “As humans, we can fall into where we’re in between the two places of past and future, old version of self, new version of self, not making a decision, making a decision, there’s a confusion, there’s a joy, there’s a sadness. There’s a real confrontation about that moment, and this song is about that very middle ground. At some point, you have to set it off. Put the first foot forward. Go for it. The whole song is basically a crescendo to the moment where you actually end up taking that step—which is the second half of the song basically, this big sort of drop moment.” “On the Eve of the Rush” Parissa Tosif: “This one, I think, is about longing and also feeling…I guess building off that idea of wanting to change, like questioning how I had been approaching my life and my feelings around what it meant to be successful; what it meant to grow and change. A lot of the time, for example, while the album was being written, I started thinking about, ‘Oh do I want to buy a house? Do I want to do this?’ My markers of success and what was important started to shift a little bit at times from the values that I think are important.” “Turn It Around” DA: “The thing that ties this song together is the chorus: ‘I heard that I’ve been letting you down/Just wait for me, I’ll turn it around.’ Something about that really cements where the verses are, where the production is. When I think about how we made this song, it played a really crucial role in the album. For me personally, it felt like the first moment where I cracked the sound of the album. It was pretty early on. We made the first demo of this one in maybe 2018, and where it started and where it ended are almost exactly the same. It’s just a better mix, basically.” “Ephemera” PT: “I actually started crying while I was singing it because I was thinking a lot that day about my mum—and my mum had a really incredibly difficult childhood. She lost her parents and when she was, I think, 17, made the decision on her own to move to America from Europe, where she’d been sent from Iran, start a whole new life and enroll herself in university all on her own. And it has always stuck in my mind. That particular decision was a pivotal moment, and building off some of the themes we were talking about—about making that decision and taking that step—I think ‘Ephemera’ is a reflection of that moment happening in the context of my mum.” “For Once” PT: “This is acknowledging that when we are growing and trying to become better, we make mistakes. We wanted to write something that acknowledged the mistakes that both of us were making all the time with each other. We kept trying to make our friendship better and kept trying to improve our relationship, and we kept making the same mistakes of not hearing each other out, of doing things that we knew would frustrate the other person. All of us are human and then the most important thing is to actually go and make that change or reach out to that person to acknowledge that you’ve messed up.” “Start Again” DA: “We had enough upbeat tracks like this that we considered a separate EP, but we ended up folding them into the album—so there’s a few moments where it’s like, one statement has kind of been made and it’s time to go to the next thing. I feel like I’ve actually never thought of ‘Start Again’ as a companion piece to ‘For Once,’ but I do think that with the tracklisting, we sort of set it up so that it picks up at a few points when it gets too quiet, and then at a few points when it gets too big, we bring it back down. So we just think of it like this.” “I’m on My Way” DA: “Initially, I was just messing around with that guitar and the melody, and I remember Parissa liked it and it felt like—and it still kind of feels like to me, in some sense—as being an interlude on the album where you can just step back and let it do whatever it does to you, emotionally. I remember I wrote this about being away. I was thinking about being away from my wife, more than anything, but then Parissa had this really interesting component that she added to the song, which was just sort of the middle section. Reminds me of DOPE LEMON.” “Everything, All You See” PT: “I grew up in Singapore. I have Iranian parents who obviously, as I said, left really young. I’ve never felt like I really fit in a lot of the places I’ve been. People kind of group around culture or around shared life experience, and I always feel like I don’t relate except for a few places. And because I’m not a white woman, I think a lot of the time, I’ve had to be quite, like…that last chorus line: ‘Walk with defiance/Out from the water/Take back the feeling/Let go of how they see you.’” “Higher Than This” PT: “This song’s really about, as a woman, realizing the amount of toxic masculinity and sexism and misogyny that still continues to rule society. I had a lot of conversations with Maribelle Anes, who I wrote this song with, about how it’s kind of funny because people who choose to deprive others of their dignity are losing out on a life that is higher in nature. They’re losing out on beautiful experiences, they’re losing out on friendships, they’re losing out on a life of joy, because they’re choosing to oppress others—because they’re choosing to put others down.” “You & I” PT: “I met this guy who was basically crazy. We were talking about the equality of men and women and equality of people in society, and he basically said he didn’t think that there was inequality. So I wrote some verses about how someone can be in a completely different world, but be next to you. He also thought that women were at a lower station, by design. He was actively pursuing something that is so antithetical to how either of us think. It was just a wild experience. Then David thought that it was about him. We were fighting a lot at that point.” “All the Worlds” PT: “My grandmother passed away when my mum was nine, and she looked exactly like me. I’ve always felt really connected to her even though I’ve never met her and I always felt her spirit in my life. I was told once to read a book called the Rubáiyát, which is a poetry book by Omar Khayyám—and 800 years later this book was taken by this guy in Europe called Edward FitzGerald, who did a beautiful translation of it and added to it. It made me think about how, even if you’ve never met someone, you can kind of be connected to them, and how those connects happen through music and arts. It’s kind of about those two things.” “On Highways” PT: “In a way, it’s an appreciation for the moment of life that you’re in, the headspace that you’re in. If you’re choosing to grow and move forward always, there’s like an acknowledgment of where one is at. I believe in God. I believe there’s something higher. Whatever you call it, whether it’s like a spirit or something that’s bigger than us. I think it’s almost like a moment of acknowledging the smallness of being human. It’s also got audio clips of David and I and our friends at the end of it, so it’s kind of a summary of our journey and our friendship and the gratitude we have for that.”