On Feb. 6, flatroom !!, an up-and-coming Detroit-based artist, released their newest single, “EVERY SECOND COUNTS.” This addictive glitchpop track was co-produced by Michigan-based artist Intentions.
This song is ridiculously danceable with a high-energy beat that you can picture yourself jumping to in a sweaty crowd at a DJ set. Most of the track is carried by buzzing, rumbling synths that give the effect of an electric charge in listeners’ ears. Many of the sounds, including flatroom’s vocals, are chopped into pieces that have clear split seconds of silence between them. This choppiness contributes to the clean-cut, glitchy feeling of the song.
As the title suggests, “EVERY SECOND COUNTS” lyrically focuses on time and how valuable and relentless it can be.
“Just give me a minute, something’s going off /
I thank you for your patience /
I’ll be up just a little bit later tonight.”
Flatroom also includes a repeating motif of pieces of a body being somehow missing or suppressed: a mouth with no tongue to speak with, a throat with no cords to sing with, ears with no drums to hear with. This motif running parallel to the theme of time gives the song a sense of anxiety and urgency, as if, with every passing second, something is being lost or damaged.
A music video for “EVERY SECOND COUNTS” was released on Feb. 20. It was filmed in Move Detroit, a gym in Royal Oak that regularly fuses live music with workouts. The video features flatroom dancing and jumping around, along with a crowd of people dressed in fursuits, merch and alternative fashion. With flashing lights, slo-mo shots and people partying around the central figure of the artist, the video holds parallels to Jane Remover’s video for “Dancing With Your Eyes Closed.”
“EVERY SECOND COUNTS” was released almost a year after flatroom’s debut album, You Will Only Get Older, which they sample in this new single. At the time of writing, the song has over 4,000 streams on Spotify, and the music video has garnered 1,200 views over its first weekend. This track has set a solid stage for flatroom to continue making waves in both the Michigan music scene and the hyperpop scene as a whole.
