Singaporean Artist Linying’s Side Project Doris Club Shares Debut LP ‘There’s Still Time’

LA-via-Singapore artist Doris Club (also known as Linying) shares her debut LP There’s Still Time via Nettwerk. The record includes production assists from Jordan Blackmon (Toro Y Moi), Jake Falby (Julie Byrne), Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie), and was mixed by James Riotto (Jamie xx, Dirty Projectors) at Altamira Sound.

Doris Club’s origin lies within the touching tribute to her ailing mother who has been living with trigeminal neuralgia for several decades. While Linying’s very own 2023 EP House Mouse follows her intuition toward a kaleidoscopic form of dream-pop, the Doris Club venture, however, centers around a collective of songs that serves as an expansive but patient journey of experimental and lush sonic surfaces reflected in her affinity towards 1960’s jazz, pop, and folk.

A flair for visual storytelling is established on There’s Still Time, which is a poetic collection of pensive, melodic pieces that lovingly orbit around every existential lesson she’s learned from her mother (her name written into the artist’s moniker) about love, uncertainty, and surrender. The duality of the record is sonically divided in two, with the first half that brings upon an uplifting exploration of emotions and the second half, shifting into a more personal, sprawling, and philosophical account. Earnestly intimate, danceable in many ways, and driven by life’s themes of ambiguity, confusion, and positivity that are explored through the lens of an intuitive daughter trying to make sense of it all. There’s Still Time is rooted with honesty and grief, yet its shimmering undertones guide listeners back to a place of vast promise and wide-eyed optimism.

Doris Club’s only limitations, really, are the stretches of her mind. “I feel like the best decisions I’ve ever made were the ones where I felt least restricted by my fear of an outcome,” she shares. This ethos drives There’s Still Time, none more so than on the impressionistic ballad “Lily, There’s Still Time.” A stylistic outlier amid the album’s endless frontier of shimmering pop, it finds her opining, “So say your goodbyes / Oh, you sure love crying / There’s plenty of time / Left to find something exciting.” As it turns out, there is no Lily. She’s speaking to herself. “I sometimes think I have a pretty determinist view on life, but with ‘Lily,’ it’s my future self-egging my present self on, saying, ‘You can do this.’ There’s a lot ahead of you.”

Doris Club divulges deeper about her new single and debut project, “Every few years, I have the ability to write a song that is freakishly prophetic and details a feeling I have yet to feel. It’s rare, and it always begins by my piano, where I start playing without any intention or inkling of what’s to come. The metaphors write themselves and are nonsensical to my conscious mind and I finish the song almost always in tears, confused and then shrugging it off as a momentary trance, only for months or, in ‘Lily, There’s Still Time’s case, years to pass and for events to transpire that subsequently clarify the core of what the song is about. I knew this process to be true for myself long before I read any psychoanalytic theorist, and understand better now that in starting Doris Club, a project named after my mother who has suffered a debilitating neuralgia for more than half her life now, I’ve been trying to befriend my intuition, a practice for which she has always been a shining example, as irrational and governed by her whims I’ve always thought her to be. The notion that there’s still time came to me in this song years ago, expanded itself in the making of this record, brought me a comfort long before I needed it and today, reminds me that its passage is anything but linear. In that way, there’s nothing to fear.

I was sensitive to the passage of time from a young age. The gentle, candid nature with which my mother talked to me about death and impermanence made a zealous disciple of the moment, obsessive hoarder of memories out of me… this was the conclusion I came to while making this record. I’ve feared time as much as I’ve worshipped it.”

Last month’s single, “The Sleeper and The Bed” premiered on FLOOD was co-written and co-produced with Rob McCurdy of Noise Club. Doris Club’s tender lilt backed by a delicate fingerpicked guitar and touch of rich textures, illustrates a sense of grief and sorrow on the folk-y pop effort. “The Sleeper and The Bed” is an all-encompassing tale of heartache with lyrics “Do you know you make me so afraid? / Can we talk like I see you doing with your demons? / I know them all by name” signaling Doris Club’s distressing exchange with her brother. Doris Club had previously shared a live performance video of the track “Wake Up (If I Was God),” a tender piano rendition filmed at the renowned Village Studios in Los Angeles.

There’s Still Time LP is available at all digital retailers here:

https://dorisclub.ffm.to/theresstilltime_album

Listen to “Lily, There’s Still Time” here:

Watch “Wake Up (If I Was God)” live performance video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K39YnUEvknU

There’s Still Time Tracklisting:

1. Wake Up (If I Was God)

2. The Movie

3. The Sea, The Ocean

4. Oh No! (Part I)

5. Oh No! (Part II)

6. Seraphina

7. The Sleeper and The Bed

8. 80 Mile Sunrise

9. The Greatest Prize

10. Born Good

11. Lily, There’s Still Time