Marci – 99 Dimensional
Marci—the project of Marta Cikojevic—releases “99 Dimensional,” the second single from her forthcoming album, Mask Lady and Late Night Girl, out August 28th via Arbutus Records.
Following lead single, “Butterfly Sticker,” which “returns us to Marci’s signature retro comfort zone, pulling elements from the ’80s and ’90s” (Stereogum), “99 Dimensional” is pure pop sugar. The track is a bubbly and guileless Janet Jackson-esque dance track about a love so big it transcends time and space, a telepathic connection that lasts forever. Marci comments: “‘99 Dimensional’ says I love you x infinity, and winks at nostalgia. The video also feels like something put together in the 2000s, filmed both in LA and Croatia.”
When we last heard from Marci, she was inviting us to dance the pain away under the glittery lights of a disco ball on 2022’s Marci. A longtime member of the Montreal group TOPS, Marci established Cikojevic as a solo artist with an intuitive understanding of pop music as a vehicle for emotional catharsis on and off the dancefloor. Four years later, Cikojevic returns with Mask Lady and Late Night Girl, another record of euphoric pop with a heart of gold, but now there’s a tinge of melancholy accompanying ebullience, a nostalgic glow around the glitter. These are party girl anthems for when the party is over, delivered with love and compassion for the good times and great memories.
For Mask Lady and Late Night Girl, Cikojevic wanted to try “things we didn’t get to do on [Marci] with singing styles or production, and songwriting that had more rock and roll and glam influences.” So, along with the array of vintage synths that gave Marci a warmly futuristic aesthetic, Mask Lady boasts a broader instrumental palette and elements drawn from both the Y2k-era messy pop girlies like Uffie and Kesha and Cikojevic’s love of 80s power balladeers like White Snake and Def Leppard.
With its careful balance of bittersweet and breezy sentiments, Mask Lady and Late Night Girl is a record that holds up a mirror to the dualities that define and soundtrack our lives: rock and pop, past and future, happiness and sadness, the inner and outer worlds. For Cikojevic, the heart of Mask Lady and Late Night Girl is the idea that we all have a masked woman and late night girl inside—sometimes we live as if the sun will never rise, sometimes we hide our true face from the world. The true self is somewhere between the two. “It’s anybody and nobody,” she says. “It’s you”.
#marciii