MUN SING - Inflatable Gravestone (2023)

‘Inflatable Gravestone’ is the debut album by Mun Sing (aka Giant Swan’s Harry Wright).

The motivating force of the album is the sudden loss of Harry’s father in 2020. Their father struggled with substance addiction and the album explores ideas of 'spirituality' and the ‘higher self’ in relation to addiction and its parallels with the coping mechanisms of grief. It also aims to highlight the importance of humour and distraction when coping with loss.

Serving as a narrative for their own experiences, the album is largely built around club-centred tracks (such as ‘Spider’ and ’Squabble’) broken up by moments of yearning and reflection in tracks like ’The Poison Garden’ and ‘Helhest (Azrael Smirks)’ and moments of dark anguish like 'Inheritor' with its heavy slab-like chords and pensive piano. Flirting with awkward and suggestive rhythms, Wright deliberately suspends moments of resolution and groove in favour of drama and jerky, unexpected cartoonish humour, taking as much influence from the likes of the Art Of Noise as Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

Wright rewards the listener with moments of clarity and introspection like flags on the journey, recruiting vocalist MX World to deliver lyrics and melodic ideas created by them and their father. Their father’s journals in rehab helped inform most of the lyrics. Some take whole sentences as a way to physically ‘give life’ to his words for the first time. The lyrics describe feelings, revelations and apocalyptic hallucinations. MX World's clear, direct tone suggests folk music and the timelessness of the human condition.

The album concludes with the title track ‘Inflatable Gravestone’ which features a chorus of giddy manipulated laughter from Wright’s friends and family to a truly maddening effect. This is then resolved by bright and clear piano chords and the sound of Wright’s father breathing in his sleep. A deeply affecting and personal record with corkscrew twists and turns and a healthy dose of absurdism.