Do you remember that moment when a bird flies past you, its wings cutting the air, and for the briefest second, you’re not sure if you’re watching hope flee or return? That’s the sensation Michael Kumar seems to capture with his latest single, “Fly.” It’s not a song about wings, not in the traditional sense — it’s a song about escape and finding broken pieces of yourself in mid-air. And while most tracks about break-ups tend to lean toward the ‘sad boy with a lonely guitar’ trope, Kumar swerves into something more like abstract emotional painting, using sound instead of canvas.
Backed by Romain’s drums, which alternately cradle and jar the rhythm like a heart that can’t quite make up its mind, and John’s bass, grounding everything while daring you to find solid footing, “Fly” feels like an attempt to look trauma square in the face. But then again, maybe it’s an avoidance, or is it understanding?
The ambiguity is part of its charm — much like self-discovery, there’s no straight line. Kumar weaves modal scales into his songwriting, a choice that both disorients and soothes, like trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces only to find that maybe the beauty lies in the gaps.
The strings aren’t just instruments here, they feel personified — pulling, stretching, healing, unraveling. Kumar is less interested in providing easy emotional closure and more in soundtracking the loose ends we all carry.
If “Fly” were a painting, it’d be a Rothko bathed in twilight — at once soothing and demanding contemplation. Perhaps, that’s the real magic here. It’s not about what you feel so much as how it makes you *want* to feel.
Healing isn’t linear, and “Fly” seems to hum that back to us, over and over.
Follow Michael Kumar on Bandcamp YouTube and Instagram.
