NYC synth-pop artist Loren Berí captures the uneasy collision between yearning for the past and disgust for the people we once were in “Dimes Square Is Over” ft. Moorea, a dreamy song that hides its ache beneath a buoyant dance-floor pulse.

Stream: “Dimes Square Is Over” – Loren Berí ft. Moorea

Have you ever been wrapped up in a scene before?

So intrinsically tapped into a hotbed of art and community that you see yourself more as part of a cultural entity than as an individual person?

Maybe it was the neighborhood you lived in when you first moved to a new city or the subgenre of music you watched be born and slowly absorbed by the mainstream. Regardless, it ended the same way, didn’t it? A quiet decomposition that rotted away at the core of the thing, until one day you looked up and realized it had all but turned to dust. Loren Berí reckons with that slow erosion on his latest single “Dimes Square is Over” ft. Moorea, a buoyant synth-pop confrontation with nostalgia, aging, and the jadedness that creeps in when the culture that once defined you moves on without you.

I’d say the scene is over
If I knew what it was
Too young for LCD
Too old for the drugs

You tried but you can’t relate
To children with a city on a silver plate

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Dimes Square is Over,” out July 14, in which this loss is the heart of the matter. For Berí, the song marks both a long-awaited return and a slight departure. The Brooklyn-based synth-pop artist is known for songs like “Al Pacino” and “My Brooklyn (Is Better Than Yours)” – tracks that pair sharp New York observation with a playful, synth-driven sensibility. Together with Parisian indie- and electro-pop artist Moorea, what he delivers here is something slightly askew from that previous work. “Dimes Square is Over” isn’t the kind of oscillating, synth-heavy, pounding bass-beat tune that you would hear in any designer club downtown; it’s the sort of thing that would have played in a college club in the 2010s.

The track is oozing with that kind of upbeat, grooving rhythm that made bands like Foster the People, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Killers sensations. There is still a jumping beat that you can rave around a dark club to like a madman, but the rest of the song isn’t nearly so electronically minded. It prominently features a rich, complex string arrangement packed with cellos, guitars, and bass, as well as a collection of other backing instruments which aren’t typical of the genre – namely a killer saxophone part and some tasty work on the keys.

Berí initially conceived the track as something more firmly rooted in synth-pop, but the song began asking for a different approach.

“I started this song as synthpop, but when I came back to it I wanted something warmer, and realized synthpop wasn’t fitting it,” he explains. “So I gave myself two rules for producing the new songs: No ’80s synths save for one song, mellotron plug-ins otherwise for synths – and anything left over from my demo had to be re-amped if I wasn’t replacing it with something analogue. So the mellotrons went through a 1950s Sano accordion amp my friend Frankie Sunswept found on the street.”

The arrangement was also guided by a recurring image Berí could neither fully place nor shake.

“I kept getting this image in my head of some piece of art, maybe a collage, I must’ve walked by a hundred times in college or something,” he tells Atwood Magazine. “I admire people who let their mind be scaffolding while they paint with their feelings, so I tried to not overthink it.”

It’s like a musical hit of molly. You hear it, and you feel good, feel lighter, like maybe things actually are going to go your way. Then you start to chew on the lyrics a bit.

Twenty year cycle
Guess twenty’s not enough
Kicking the past in the teeth
The world’s calling the bluff

Guess they can’t relate
To children with a city on a silver plate

The idea for the song began with a conversation that made the generational distance at its center impossible to ignore.

“I was talking to a Dimes Square musician who asked what I thought of a song by another artist,” Berí recalls. “I said I thought it sounded pretty influenced by LCD Soundsystem. They said, ‘Is LCD Soundsystem a band?’ And I thought, well, now I have to write a song about this.”

The first chorus strikes you immediately, especially the lines “You tried but you can’t relate / To children with a city on a silver plate.” For this writer, it evokes memories of hazy summer nights running up and down the main drag of an empty Rust Belt town with three of your best friends, half a pack of menthols, and a bottle of Moscato. It’s the pained cry of a man unable to relate to the hip young cats of Dimes Square, a microneighborhood in Manhattan, not really a fully independent cultural area but a collected pocket of like-minded individuals – one whose very ambiguity initially intrigued Berí.

“For about a year, whoever was explaining what Dimes Square is had to say, ‘Well, so it’s not an actual neighborhood, but it’s sort of part of the Lower East Side and Chinatown, and it’s a ‘scene,’” he says. “At first, I just liked the idea of people getting excited about a fictional neighborhood. Then everyone was into the ‘twenty-year cycle’ thing of New York scenes, and that maybe New York was getting our next Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs or LCD Soundsystem.”

Berí eventually went searching for the scene himself.

“I went to a couple shows, and the first one was in this musty basement of a bar,” he recalls. “It seemed very ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ vibes, with hip humans who all seemed to know each other, and I felt like Kermit goes to Berghain.”

The chorus provokes a warm nostalgic feeling that turns sour when you begin to consider it a bit further and realize you would rather be shot in the foot than try the tricks you used to pull back then today. The scene is gone; it rotted away, remember? Now that it’s gone, something else must rise in its place, something …new. Ye gods! The question we now hear Berí tangle with is: Do we have to be jaded about it?

If I can’t feel it breaking
If you don’t I don’t care
If you don’t know what you’re faking
What is a heart to Dimes Square

Dimes Square is over
If I knew what it was
Pull the yellow string
Let’s see what it does

We listen as Berí lashes at the age gap that separates what is hot from what is now not. He mourns his lack of faith in the fabled twenty-year cycle that gives rise to a new New York-based music zeitgeist every second decade. He laments the desecration of times gone past by a modern scene that doesn’t seem to realize that one day it will pass as well. Most of all, he ponders whether these plagues have found him, or if he has projected them onto the happenings around him.

Berí recognized that pattern himself.

“I was thinking about different songs I’ve written where I sound jaded about a scene or a city, and I realized that they have little or nothing to do with the actual scene or place – but more to do with projecting my own stuff at a place around me,” he says. “I think the pattern is that instead of processing any specific situation in my own life, the songwriter in me, for whatever reason, keeps saying, ‘F*** this entire place, and let’s make it almost funny.’”

Berí sings with just a hint of sorrow in his voice. This is not a man openly weeping, but one keeping his composure as he eulogizes both fading youth and the streets he can no longer recognize. The tune sounds like a dunk on the kids at first, but after a few listens, you begin to realize it’s the internal conflict of someone realizing the problem was his outlook all along.

“I was starting to feel like a ghost that has to ask for your help completing a task before they can finally move on from the house of jaded songs,” Berí says. “I think I’m free now!”

Wonder what you’re missing
as you’re catching the gust
Wake up in confetti with
someone you don’t trust

You tried but you can’t relate
Children with a city on a silver plate

The lines “Kicking the past in the teeth / The world’s calling the bluff / Guess they can’t relate / To children with a city on a silver plate” bring that internal conflict into focus. On the surface, it reads like a dig: These goddamn kids are kicking the good ole’ days in the teeth, and they’re just a bunch of spoiled posers! But as you listen to it again and work over what’s being said, you start to look at it from a different angle. It is not a jab at the youth, but at the man himself. It’s Berí spitting upon his old ways of turning his nose up at anything that may challenge his carefully crafted persona, owning the fear that everyone around him can see right through the act, and finally seeing that the time may have passed for him to be one of those cool young people enjoying the world spread out before them.

“Dimes Square is Over” is in some ways a dedication to our lost youths.

In others, it’s a shocked gasp at the goings-on of today’s cultural hotspots.

But most importantly, it’s the tale of a man processing the world around him and considering if it has turned on him – or if he has turned on it. All of this unfolds amidst a bold cacophony of synths, guitars, drums, bass, cellos, keys, and saxophones. Dimes Square may be over, but it seems Loren Berí is just getting started. Stream “Dimes Square is Over” exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and ask yourself whether the scene has really turned to dust – or whether we’re the ones already fading from it.

If I can’t feel it breaking
If you don’t I don’t care
If you don’t know what you’re faking
What is a heart to Dimes Square

Dimes Square is over
If I knew what it was
Pull the yellow string
Let’s see what it does

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:: connect with Loren Berí here ::

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Stream: “Dimes Square Is Over” – Loren Berí

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 © Nate DiDomizio
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