Dime by Serebii

For his second full-length LP and most realized release as Serebii yet, Callum Mower had one thing he had to overcome first: he was “terrified” of himself.

After establishing the Serebii project with several albums’ worth of trancing neo-soul and shape-shifting ballads, much of it done in collaboration with fellow New Zealander Arjuna Oakes, Mower had no lack of confidence in his musical abilities. But much of Mower’s focus in the past was on instruments and production—swirling, cinematic instrumentals under his own name or funky art-pop jams with others on vocals. On Dime, however, Mower knew he wanted to push forward with his own singing placed center stage. “It’s exposing,” Mower says of releasing music so heavy on his singing. “It feels like you’re walking into a public space naked.”

Mower, it turns out, has nothing to be afraid of. He has a gentle croon deceptive in its power—on a song like “Feet for Pegs,” for example, he lures you in with a Tropicalia guitar progression, but carries the song on vocal subtleties that pass like wisps of smoke. And using that voice, he’s created an album unlike anything he’s done before, rolling seamlessly from track to track—not just a collection of songs but a singular project conceived to work together as a unified statement. “That was the approach with Dime,” Mower says. “To really focus on putting something together that sounded like it was done in one sitting. One chapter.”

For a few months, Mower did little besides eat, sleep, and make music. Outside of a deep love for the music of Aldous Harding, which he takes as inspiration, Mower didn’t listen to much outside of his own work. Instead, he focused on developing a routine: yoga, walks, free writing in the morning to get everything out instead of letting it bottle in. “Just trying to feel, trying to release, and then going in and conjuring that while you’re hovering over a chord progression,” he explains. “Just focus on expression.”

On “Verrans Corner,” the Serebii sound crests over a tall wave as Mower sings of “sailing like furniture on estuaries,” his voice recalling the jazzy falsetto of Thom Yorke. “Dime,” the title track, started as a finger-plucked guitar melody in a strange tuning that led to Mower putting the whole song together in a day. It’s a reflection on the feeling of having been cast into the world with little more than some loose change and ending up back where you started, wondering what it was all about: “Thought I’d never look back,” he sings, “Running a lie to keep on track.” But it’s also the word that came into Mower’s head when he wrote it—a dime, as in a perfect ten: “I just remember being like, that’s a dime. I got my dime.” (The album, notably, deliberately, features ten songs.)

Mower finished about 80 percent of Dime on his own before he realized that what was actually still missing wasn’t something he needed to do himself. “I got to a certain point where I just really missed working with people,” he says, laughing. “That is one of my favorite things to do: be in a room with someone and try to catch all those intricacies and bounce off each other.” Mower called up a few friends—Carla Camilleri, Leith Sye Towers, Skud Gambosi, Tessa Dillon—to add touches and write different parts. And then there was one last collaboration like no other.

For “The Randan,” Mower asked his grandfather, Allan Watkins, to read some of his writing he’d done about adolescence. As Mower recorded his grandfather’s live reading of words about growth and social confusion, he improvised a backing synth track. The result is a song that feels experimental and otherworldly, but surprisingly warm at the same time. Three generations of New Zealanders bridged over a love of music and art—and a grandfather and grandson both pushing aside apprehensions about their own voices to make something beautiful and meaningful. (Watkins’ voice was affected by a recent stroke.)

Watkins, a musician himself, was the one who got Mower into music as a kid; in more than one sense, there is no Serebii without him. “It felt appropriate to get my grandpa involved,” Mower says, “as an ode to him for encouraging me in the first place.”

artist, producer, mixing engineer, and multi-instrumentalist