“Throughout making this record, I was really wrestling with location and place and home,” Mansionair singer Jack Froggatt tells Apple Music. “There’s nothing like being in a city away from your regular routines to really invigorate the writing process.” That process had already begun on the band’s tour in support of 2022’s Happiness, Guaranteed, during which the Sydney trio sculpted the final 20 minutes of their set to be “relatively close” to the direction they would pursue on Some Kind of Alchemy. “I think we were going in with this purpose of, ‘Hey, let’s make more [music] like this; this felt really good live,’” says Froggatt. “It felt like a more old-school approach.” Key was a desire to rekindle the early creative direction of the band. “Make it feel like that naïve version of Mansionair that we had started with 10 years prior,” says Froggatt. “Minimal, electronic-leaning, but still having foundations in solid songwriting. The words I kept throwing around as we were recording were ‘distillation’ and ‘refining.’ Pushing aside any distraction of what other people might have been expecting of us and going, ‘What do the three of us think Mansionair is?’ Let’s run towards that.” The album’s somber, melodramatic synths combine with Froggatt’s angelic falsetto to create a sound the singer dubs “cry dancing.” “You know, insecure on the dance floor, but as well carrying this idea of hope and elation and letting go. I think we tried to hold those two things in the same hand.” Here, Froggatt takes Apple Music to the dance floor and runs through Some Kind of Alchemy, track by track. “Heavyweight” “When we thought about how we want to open the record, we really wanted something to come in strong and heavy-handed, and just emotionally, musically, sonically portray the feeling of being held down. This synth sound was almost like a call to action: ‘Hey, there’s this elephant in the room and this emotion that’s sitting here,’ and is there a way to tear it down and just go, ‘All right, I’m gonna look into this.’ And the title ‘Heavyweight’ just spoke to those feelings.” “Lose Yourself Again” “This song is quite elusive to me. It has many different façades. To me, it’s kind of like the mantelpiece of the themes of this record, where it’s like, ‘What does it mean to lose yourself?’ Because it can be a bad thing, right? But in this circumstance, I think I was trying to explore this idea of, how to shed that skin, and maybe even acknowledging that there are people around us in our lives that can be there to assist that process.” “Sucker / Psycho” “I think ‘Sucker / Psycho’ was feeding into this idea of maybe loosening up; the idea that we’re not necessarily cause and effect. Sometimes, what we do doesn’t eventuate into what we think is going to happen. I think that was just another angle of exploring what it feels like to let go and actually just kind of embrace, like, ‘I will go out with my friends and I won't worry about tomorrow.’ I feel like that’s a theme that we’ve explored a lot throughout this band.” “The Way You Move in Me” “This song reminds me of when I’m far from my partner, or when I’m feeling distant from a true, honest connection, or I’m distant from something that feels familiar. I feel like it’s kind of almost side by side to one of our older songs called ‘Astronaut,’ which talks a lot about feeling isolated in a new environment and longing for the idea of home, or the idea of a place where you’re known, and everything is safe. But I think maybe this song feels like it’s encouraging that danger and encouraging that feeling to kind of push beyond the limit.” “On Your Side” “I think this might be lyrically my favorite song on the record, based on the fact that I don’t think we’d ever really written from the perspective of friendship. Not a romantic love, but a true, honest, friendship. This song is, ‘Hey, I’m here for you. Like, what do you need? I believe in you. I trust you.’ I guess another angle is like, what it feels like to let go and have some accountability to who you’re picking by your side, and who’s there when you are at your lowest, or who’s even there at the big heights too. It’s just a song about friendship.” “Orbit” “This song feels very in the trenches of old Mansionair. We wanted to bring the guitars in and keep that flag standing of like, ‘Hey, we’re a band making electronic music. And these are the sounds that feel quite closely linked to where we began.’ On the lyric front, we’re experiencing what it feels like to be human with people who are around us. You have friendships that only take you so far and then you move on, and you have people in your life that you’ve known forever, and you always will. And I think [‘Orbit’] is just an attempt to understand the flows and the ebbs of that experience.” “Like Fire” “For me this song is like, ‘Whatever you need, I’m here to make you you, and I just want this to be great. And I want this relationship to be great. Or I want this moment to be great.’ I think there’s a brooding, sexy kind of feeling to this song that feels lustful and [full of] desire.” “Eraser” “We tend to make albums and songs that are relatively melodramatic. I think we’re like, ‘Hey, if we’re pursuing this end goal of being elated and free and loose and bright and vibrant, we’ve got to have a song that actually gets there, or at least tries to get there.’ And I think this song was just like, ‘Whatever you do, or whatever you say, I know you and I know your heart and I know your values, I will not hold the smallest thing or the biggest thing against you. I’m here for the long haul.’ It feels so good when you have someone there that’s just like, ‘I’m going to be here cheering you on.’” “Skin on Skin” “It feels so literal—I just want touch. You just want to be held sometimes. You just want to feel that there’s someone there to hold you in the present moment when things feel a little too much. It’s like, ‘Damn, I’m far away. And I just want to be present with you.’ It was just a simple approach to explaining physical connection.” “ATLAS” “I think with ‘Lose Yourself Again’ and ‘ATLAS,’ we start here and we end here. And ‘ATLAS’ is a song that means a lot to me personally in uncovering this idea of home and place. I spent a lot of time throughout the recording and writing process living in new cities. This song kind of summarizes what it feels like to relocate and to shift and change and reach for a new understanding of your own environment in order to kind of unlock whatever’s going on internally. The lesson I learned from a song like ‘ATLAS’ is no matter where you are, you will always be influenced by the people that have shaped you and brought you to this point. It doesn’t really matter where you are, but it matters who you’re with. I say it too: ‘At last I found my place, the alchemy within your warm embrace.’”