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Feb 11, 2025 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Sam Nolin

Last year, French art pop musician Swan Wisnia shared her debut album under the moniker molto morbidi, String Cheese Theory. Since then, she returned with a new track, “Chocolate Ashtray,” the lead single from her EP of the same name due out on April 11th via No Salad Records. The EP sees Wisnia continuing to generate new glassy and idiosyncratic angles on avant pop, synthwave, and post punk.

As she describes, the EP’s title is meant to be absurdist. “How stupid would it be to actually use chocolate as a material for an ashtray? But I also loved the contrast—the sweetness of chocolate and the grossness of cigarette butts. It’s a poetic object, especially the morning after a party—it has a sense of joy that’s now lost, a feeling that comes through in much of my music.”

Today, Wisnia is sharing hte second of the record’s three tracks, “Casual Shapeshifting,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Casual Shapeshifting” offers a skeletal vision of Wisnia’s retrofuturistic art pop, stripping layers of instrumentation away before steadily reintroducing them. The track begins as an offbeat synth experiment, with Wisnia’s vocals pirouetting above a wiry bassline and a playful keyboard rhythm. Yet, as the track blooms into its chorus, these sparse elements fill out with spacey synth tones and sprawling vocal harmonies, bursting into a delightful melodic color. Wisnia shapeshifts between these modes effortlessly, lacing her off-kilter sensibilities with a steadfast pop sheen that feels essential to molto morbidi’s sound.

She says of the track, “It’s definitely the perkiest song and in some way the most electronic song of the EP, along the lines of both synth pop and bossa nova. I doubled the beat with a modified Flexatone sound that makes the whole tune sound slightly cartoonish. I think the result is some sort of spaced-out kawaii tune: a hybrid song that could maybe find its place in Suicide’s debut album or Paul McCartney’s II. The lyrics address the sort of attention and care to others that people pleasers tend to have. Being a people pleaser, unfortunately, I know the paradoxical situation it puts you in, because on one hand it implies being overly interested in others, to the point where you can forget yourself completely, but on the other hand, it has nothing to do with true selflessness, it’s actually quite the opposite, because the whole point is to adapt the way you behave in order for others to love you.”

Check out the song below. The Chocolate Ashtray EP is out everywhere on April 11th.