Explain by tendai

The file name on his laptop says “Explain_v7_FINALmaybe.” That is closer to the truth than any tagline. tendai trims until only the necessary remains. Words sit squarely on the beat. Silence reads like punctuation. The melody climbs by a clean interval, then stops before it spills. No flourish. No mist.

He comes out of East London with an arranger’s ear and a diarist’s restraint. The Rain introduced him as a builder of atmosphere. Synths hovered. Vowels ran long. Reverb breathed like a second instrument. “Explain” folds that patience into something leaner. The tempo sits just above resting heart. Drums are dry enough to show fingerprints. The mix keeps the vocal forward and unvarnished, which forces every syllable to carry its own weight.

What he writes here is not autobiography dressed as allegory. It reads like notes typed after midnight, then retyped the next morning with the lights on. Sentences get shorter. Images get specific. A kitchen light cutting across tile. A message left unsent. He declines closure and gains clarity. The hook loops because thought loops. Repetition is function, not effect.

Arrangement choices tell you how seriously he treats attention. Kick and bass are aligned but not glued, which leaves a narrow lane where the voice can move without getting pushed. Snares snap, then exit. Pads arrive in the second hook, not the first, so the track grows in real time.

The bridge refuses the easy modulation. He filters the loop, holds pressure for eight bars, and drops back into the chorus like a decision. It is craft that trusts the listener to keep up.

He writes to the syllable. Consonants land on bar lines. Vowels carry feeling without sliding into runs that would blur meaning. When the melody lifts, the move feels inevitable rather than athletic. That precision is the record’s quiet muscle. You can hear the edit. Metaphors traded for objects. Explanations cut where a breath tells you more.

East London shows up as discipline rather than branding. These songs are built for small rooms where crowd noise punishes excess. He knows where to leave air, how to shape a pre chorus so the hook earns its entrance, when to stop a phrase a half beat early so the next line hits cleaner. The city is in the pacing. Platform clocks. Sliding doors. The cadence of estates at dusk. Embedded, never announced.

A year without releasing does not appear as a press bullet. It shows up in small mechanics. He plants his feet wider. He holds eye contact through a line that costs. He lets a crack on a consonant live if it reveals the hour of the take. Notes are taped above the desk that say cut the bridge, lower the pad, say it simpler. Nothing romantic about it. Just work.

“Explain” is about not knowing what to do next and refusing to dramatize that fact. The lyric circles the problem rather than inventing an answer. He names the absence and sits with it. That is riskier than confession dressed as spectacle. It means the song has to stand on arrangement, tone, and timing. It does. Strip it to piano and pulse and it still holds shape.

You can trace a line from The Rain to here and see what stayed. Patience. An allergy to padded emotion. A belief that the smallest choices decide the whole. What left is the haze. The edges are visible now. Drum transients you can count. Harmonies stacked only where they lift a chorus instead of hiding inside it. The last hook thickens on the third and the fifth. Nothing else moves. He pockets the obvious trick and chooses the right one.

Live, the track recalibrates a set without announcement. Count in. Downbeat. No stems swallowing the band. Only what the composition asks for. In noisy rooms, phones dip because the pocket is insistent and the voice is close. In quiet rooms, the one beat gap after the key line lands like held breath. He does not cue a singalong. He protects the negative space and lets the crowd meet him there.

As a working snapshot, this is what matters. tendai writes for the ear first, for the archive second, for the timeline never. He favors drum patterns that tell the truth, melody lines that get to the point, and language plain enough to live in your head after playback. “Explain” is not a pivot engineered for headlines. It is continuity with the fat cut away. A more direct voice. A tighter perimeter. The same moral seriousness about detail.

If you have been listening since The Rain, the growth reads like engineering. Fewer parts. Better tolerances. More headroom around a voice that does not waste motion. If you are new, this is a clean entry point. Four minutes where every choice feels weighed. When it ends, there is no tag. The short reverb fades and stops. The lesson sits in the restraint. Say what the line can carry. Leave the rest alone. Trust the silence to do its share.