— Multi-GRAMMY Award-nominated Dreamville artist Bas and London-based duo The Hics unveil the official artwork and tracklist for their upcoming album Melanchronica, out June 17 via Dreamville/FIENDS, alongside the atmospheric new track “Erewhon” featuring Saba.
A genre-blurring meditation on presence and escape, “Erewhon” blends fluid production, celestial textures, and sharp lyricism. The track offers a glimpse into the expansive soundscape Bas is crafting, where The Hics add an ethereal glow, Saba cuts through with quiet intensity, and Bas threads it all together with steady, introspective clarity. Built around the refrain “I wanna waste some time,” the song leans into presence and pause, letting the phrase settle like a mantra, creating atmosphere, intention, and a clear sense of direction.
The “Erewhon” music video extends the song’s ambience, placing Bas and The Hics in expansive natural settings that mirror the track’s airy, nostalgic tone. With cinematically nostalgic textures and a filmic finish, the visual leans into the organic elements of sound and space, offering a serene, timeless backdrop for its melodic mantras and meditative momentum.
Now fully independent, Bas enters his most visionary chapter yet with Melanchronica, a collaborative album with The Hics that has been quietly in the works for nearly a decade and was announced during their standout performance at the final Dreamville Festival, alongside the debut single “Everyday Ppl.” Crafted across five cities with meticulous care, Melanchronica showcases the creative synergy between Bas and The Hics at its most evolved. The album is a soundtrack for the modern condition — yearning, nostalgic, yet forward-thinking — that pulses with themes of longing, self-reflection, love, and existential tension. Anchored by Bas’s most introspective writing and The Hics’ textured, genre-defying production, it drifts through duality and the quiet ache of solitude, painting a melancholic portrait of modern life’s contradictions — where ambition and isolation, love and doubt, all coexist.
The project is a deeply emotional exploration that leaves space for each feeling to resonate, with Bas’s lyrical clarity offering both intimacy and expansiveness. Their creative partnership, which began in 2015 with a DM sparked by Bas hearing The Hics’ “Cold Air” on GTA V’s Worldwide FM, has since evolved into a deep-rooted relationship founded on trust and mutual respect. Melanchronica is the culmination of that journey.
Bas, a core Dreamville voice, is known for pairing introspective storytelling with wide-ranging sonic palettes. On Melanchronica, he leans fully into that emotional depth. Reflecting on the album’s inspiration, Bas shares,
“The longing of a lost love, the battle between our own duality, and the pensive self reflection of one’s own shortcomings are a few of the themes present on ‘Melanchronica.’ It also speaks on the battles we face against our ambitions, the responsibilities we carry for others, and oftentimes our failures in those moments.”
Lead vocalist of The Hics, Roxane Barker says,
“I feel this album is about longing and desire. A desire for more, a longing to have everything you want when you want it. It highlights the kind of existentialism we all feel sometimes whether it’s career, love or happiness.”
The Hics’ Sam Paul Evans also adds,
“This project encompasses the stories of our lives, from pre to post pandemic. I think we now yearn for the connection we once shared, unable to recall what intimacy truly feels like or how to be vulnerable with one another. Society demands more but gives less. I like to see these songs as diary entries, little reminders of what once felt close to me.”
Melanchronica captures the quiet intensity of being alive right now. It’s a meditation on the emotional weight we carry — restless ambition, tender nostalgia, fractured love — and the desire to find stillness in the noise. Honest, immersive, and deeply human, the album is a mirror for anyone navigating the in-between. As an artist who’s helped shape the cultural fabric of Dreamville and pushed the boundaries of introspective hip-hop, Bas continues to redefine what vulnerability in rap can sound like — this time, through a collaborative lens that feels both timeless and of the moment.