Last week came out Electric Life, a song again written by Duncan himself with his fiancée Jordan Garfield, and with Leroy Clampitt (who previously wrote for Justin Bieber, Adam Lambert, Dua Lipa etc.) and Paul Phamous (Nick Jonas, Frank Ocean etc.). The latter two also produced. It’s clear: Duncan Laurence knows people.

References to Arcade
When the song starts you think, because of the piano, for a moment: Arcade. And that must have been done deliberately because the text is not very far from it either. Just as Arcade had a starting point in a family member who had always grieved over someone she hadn’t been able to tell what she was feeling in time, Electric Life is an attempt to reach someone who is no longer there.

11.11
It now revolves around a death that left questions, a death that came suddenly, an end that perhaps should not have been necessary (“Was there any other way?”). Duncan wonders if you can see someone who is gone if you close your eyes and dream yourself into the velvet theater of the galaxy – at (excellent detail, lyricists!) exactly eleven minutes past eleven? In the song clip, it can be – well, for a moment: from the moment Duncan closes his eyes until he wakes up again.

Glitter
On Duncan’s album Small Town Boy, many of the best songs were co-written by Garfield, and it’s hoped that their time together will last a long time because Electric Life has that precise combination of the recognizable and the original. The alliterations in the first two sentences, the statement that in paradise there will be no traffic lights, the most beautiful sentence of the whole song: ‘You left like glitter in the wind’, the idea that you are singing along to a happy melody, and then hear some words again that really get through to you – yes, Electric life has succeeded nicely. So it better be the prelude to a new album.