Rostam has shared a new song, “Unfold You,” alongside its music video featuring actress Hari Nef. The track marks Rostam’s first release of the year after co-producing HAIM’s Women in Music Pt. III and Clairo’s Immunity.
Rostam says of creating “Unfold You”:
In November 2017 I played a show with Nick Hakim at Cafe De La Danse in Paris. This was the first Rostam show outside of America. I wasn’t familiar with Nick’s music but I was immediately drawn to it. Later that night in my hotel room I was winding down after the show and listening to some of Nick’s records. The song “Papas Fritas” came on, it’s an instrumental track, and I suddenly found myself singing a melody over it and recorded that in my voice memos. Anyone writing songs probably has a few hundred voice memos on their phone. I kept coming back to this one though, and when I returned from a North American tour in February 2018 I booked some days at my favorite Vox Studios in Hollywood.
That’s where I first met Henry Solomon, who came in to play sax on “Unfold You.” I had written out some sax lines for a few sections of the song, but others we arranged together in the studio. I wasn’t exactly sure where “Unfold You” would land. I hadn’t finished writing the song, but I continued building out the track with Nick’s “Papas Fritas” as its backbone. I decided I’d let the recording process take me where it would.
“Unfold You” was the first thing me and Henry worked on. A year later, I’d ask him to come back to Vox and record some sax lines I sketched out for the song “Summer Girl,” which I was producing for Haim. Henry can also be found playing himself in PTA’s video for the song.
“Summer Girl” came out within a few months of us starting to record it, but “Unfold You” took years. In some ways it had to— because the recording of the song tracks an evolution and a metamorphosis for me. As I write this, I’m finishing a record that deals a lot with the subject of change and for this whole album, change was what I was searching for musically.
In the summer of 2016, I was sitting on a park bench on Commercial street in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I found myself in conversation with a stranger who left me with a piece of advice that has stuck with me. “Change is good,” he said, “Go with it.”
Watch the “Unfold You” video, directed by Rostam himself, below.
