Bad Tiger’s Yasi Lowy channels healing into motion on “Spin,” a spirited, spellbinding indie rock reverie whose claymation video traces the fragile, bodily work of feeling your way back to yourself.

Stream: “Spin” – Bad Tiger

Bad Tiger’s exhilarating “Spin” begins like a body remembering it can move.

The latest from songwriter Yasi Lowy arrives in a different configuration – back to a solo Bad Tiger setup for the first time since 2022’s Sanctuary, made with producer, engineer, and session musician Geoff Saba just before Lowy left the Bay Area for Portland. The result is breathtaking, bold, and beautiful: A dizzying rush of feeling and sound that folds shuffling, drum & bass-indebted rhythms into a raw, radiant, gentle, dreamy atmosphere built to quicken the heart and stir the blood.

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering the official music video for “Spin,” a claymation and painting-based visual by Portland artist Joshua Hamilton that gives Lowy’s song a whole second life. Independently released June 12, “Spin” captures Bad Tiger in a moment of transition and reawakening, folding shuffling, drum & bass-indebted percussion, winglike synths, piano, clarinet swells, and Lowy’s dry, exposed vocal into a rush of raw sensation. Already a song about healing as sensation – the body cracking open, thawing out, and finding motion again – “Spin” becomes even more visceral onscreen: A vivid, kaleidoscopic journey of emergence, collapse, return, and renewal, rendered through a medium whose patience and tactility mirror the song’s own fascination with the pain and beauty of feeling everything come back to life.

“I wrote this song very quickly, but it wasn’t until several years later that I realized what I wanted for the drums and bass,” Lowy tells Atwood Magazine. “This was the first time I got to work with Geoff Saba and it was right before I left the Bay Area for Portland. It was just Geoff and me on the track, and they really indulged me as I described the track the way I saw it: A rose unfurling open, ambient synth like a paper bird or fluttering winds, and at the very center the vocals – dry and raw in contrast with the lush and layered atmosphere surrounding it.”

“I really wanted piano on the track as well, and ended up just improvising that final melody line in one take, and the rest of the song just revealed itself during production. ‘Spin’ feels like a tornado, a blooming, something wintered and in hibernation beginning to thaw – the pain and divinity and beauty of regaining sensation, access.”

Inside one day
I find I’m wanting again
to see that thing inside me spin.

To have healed at all
I find I’m crying at the smallest things:
a kiss from that undiscerning wind,
re-membering my skin.

That image of thawing runs through every inch of “Spin.” Lowy’s vocals sit close and exposed at the center, almost startling in their clarity against the motion around them, while the drums shuffle and surge with an anxious, mesmerizing persistence. There’s a pulse here Bad Tiger fans will recognize – that instinct toward circularity, momentum, and feeling carried forward – but Saba’s production opens it into a more enchanted, almost winged space: Moog textures fluttering at the edges, piano glinting through the haze, clarinet swells rising like breath.

“When Yasi first sent me the demo to ‘Spin,’ I saw a neat, bespoke landscape of traditional indie rock instrumentation which was informed by what I knew about Bad Tiger through their previous recordings and what I experienced live,” Saba shares. “When Yasi told me what she was envisioning for the drums, I was quite surprised and excited. She sketched out a drumbeat that to me sounded reminiscent of drum & bass. This caused me to re-examine their previous recordings and, lo, I found that there was a consistent presence of persistent and driving drums in their work that indeed harken to drum & bass, krautrock, and maybe even techno.”

“We recorded a looped guide guitar track, which we ended up using on the finished recording, to which I played drums,” Saba adds. “I would consider myself a perpetually underpracticed drummer, so playing that drum & bass pattern really put me through my paces. A few takes later, my leg muscles were already tight and strained. After that, it was all a blur of impressionistic overdubs consisting of piano, clarinet swells, intuitively performed Moog Matriarch, stacks of vocals, and much more.”

Having given all I had
and then, to hear it crack against
the ways we cannot bend.
To feel the spill of me
across the pavement.

Lyrically, “Spin” lives in the strange astonishment of healing – not as resolution, but as sensation returning.

Lowy writes of crying at small things, laughing at strange things, feeling the self spill out and then gather again; the song’s emotional center rests in that piercing phrase, “re-membering my skin.” It’s a line that makes the whole track click into place. After giving everything, after cracking against what cannot bend, “Spin” finds wonder in the fragile violence of becoming available to the world again.

Lowy’s color comes from the boldness of her imagery. “A kiss from that undiscerning wind” is almost funny in its precision – nature touching the body without intention, and the body still receiving it as proof that it can feel. Even the hyphen in “re-membering” matters: The word splits open, transforming memory into a physical act of putting the self back together.

That same charge runs through moments like “to hear it crack against / the ways we cannot bend” and “to feel the spill of me / across the pavement.” Lowy writes and sings sensation as impact, pressure, contact, aftermath. “Spin” doesn’t smooth that experience into easy transcendence; it lets the return of feeling stay unsettled, bodily, and a little overwhelming.

To have healed at all
I find I’m laughing
at the strangest things..
tension at the needle sting,
remembering my skin.

The official music video carries that final return to the skin into image and motion.

Created by Portland artist Joshua Hamilton, the claymation and painting-based visual takes the song’s internal thaw and gives it a body. A small clay figure begins in subterranean mud, rises into a strange and luminous landscape, gets pulled into violent motion, crashes back to earth, and still continues. The arc is deceptively simple, but its handmade textures make every movement feel earned: The figure builds, cracks, warps, and endures as pastel landscapes gather around it, frame by frame, as if the scene itself is learning how to appear.

“My experience working with Josh was super intuitive and collaborative,” Lowy says. “We talked about ideas for the initial story board, and I shared my vision with him of the general premise – the little clay being starting in the subterranean mud, emerging and getting sucked into a tornado from which they crash and return to the earth. The vision was based off of the way I am continually haunted by the writing and imagery of How It Is by Samuel Beckett, the gorgeous, rising album art by Kate Fitz, and also from the metaphors and visual conceptualization that happened through collaborating with Geoff in production.”

“From this starting point of influences and ideas, I did my best to back off and let Josh work and feel through it on his own terms,” she adds. “Throughout the process he would send me drafts and check in, but I really trusted and felt represented by his interpretation of the music, so it was easy to just say, ‘Yes, keep going!’”

The finished piece honors that trust. Rather than explain “Spin,” the video enters its weather: The blooming, the rupture, the awe, the exhaustion, the continued effort to engage with a world that can be beautiful and brutal in the same breath. Its movement is less narrative decoration than a visual echo of Lowy’s central image – a self wintered and in hibernation beginning to thaw with all the force and mess that awakening requires.

Visually, it’s as stunning as the song is stirring – a journey of discovery, trials, and eventual triumph.

“It feels like a really additive contributor to the narrative arc I feel in ‘Spin,’” Lowy reflects, “and I find the video really, really moving in the main figure’s vulnerability and continued effort to engage with a beautiful and kaleidoscopic world which picks you up in one place and sets you down somewhere brand new to figure out and rise from. I’m also just in awe of the patience and labor involved in making claymation, and the immense beauty of this medium.”

For Hamilton, that patience was part of the point. His process joins claymation with an additive drawing approach, allowing the visual world to accumulate rather than simply unfold – an especially fitting choice for a song about sensation returning in layers.

“Yasi approached me with the idea for the video and provided a series of visual prompts,” Hamilton explains. “I was interested in making this video because I’d been wanting to experiment with an additive drawing, where each frame accumulates more mark-making, allowing the world to emerge around the clay figure. I felt that the quality of pastels suited the pacing of the animation and complemented the song. The texture of the figure builds and cracks and warps as it moves, adding a weight and emotional contrast to the pastel landscape. The trust and faith that Yasi gave me during this collaboration allowed me to create something that felt authentic to my own creative process, while still expressing the emotional arc of the song.”

“Josh’s video tells the story of the song visually and narratively, adding a whole new cognitive and sensory component to the music,” Lowy shares. “I hope that this helps people connect with the art – video or song or both, and get something out of that experience!”

By the end, “Spin” feels fully embodied, carrying Lowy’s image of “re-membering my skin” into sound and texture, energy and movement.

Every part of it – Lowy’s exposed vocal, the enchanting and restless production, the song’s rhythmic drive, and the clay figure’s unsteady ascent – pushes toward the same revelation: Feeling your way back to yourself is messy, miraculous, and deeply alive. The song and video share the same physical language: A body in motion, a self coming back online, sensation arriving in pulses rather than all at once. With Hamilton’s claymation video and Kate Fitz’s artwork extending its tactile world, “Spin” stands as a one-off bridge between Bad Tiger eras – a lush, enchanting, soul-stirring release from an artist forever following the spiral wherever it leads.

Watch Atwood Magazine’s exclusive premiere of “Spin” below, and spend a few minutes inside Bad Tiger’s strange, stirring, and beautiful vision. It’s a song for the first flicker after numbness – for that wild, fragile moment when the body remembers it still knows how to move.

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