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yMusic, 'Cloud'

They say every dark cloud has a silver lining, but there's nothing threatening about "Cloud," from the upcoming album by yMusic. The piece is all shiny, fluffy lightness — a perfect pop song length track to hum along with as spring comes into bloom.

Disregarding genre pigeonholes, the new music sextet shares stages with pop stars like Paul Simon and John Legend and commissions music by today's top composers such as Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly and Andrew Norman.

"Cloud" offers glistening, metallic strings to open, followed by puffy bass chord beats from the cello, airy trumpet lines and a vocalese groove that propels the piece to cumulonimbus heights before landing safely. With its sunny outlook and sturdy construction, the song, produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Sigur Rós, Ben Frost) wouldn't sound out of place on a Feist album. It's a good reminder that amid pandemics, politics and violence, we could all use a light-filled serenade sometimes to uncloud our heads.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Tom Huizenga
Tom Huizenga is a producer for NPR Music. He contributes a wide range of stories about classical music to NPR's news programs and is the classical music reviewer for All Things Considered. He appears regularly on NPR Music podcasts and founded NPR's classical music blog Deceptive Cadence in 2010.