Aotearoa's Serebii Releases New Single ‘Dime'

On new album single/title track ‘Dime’ Serebii (aka Callum Mower) layers vocal harmonies on a sparse finger-plucked guitar for a delicate two minute track.

'Dime' started as a finger-plucked guitar melody in a strange tuning that led to Serebii 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.

With his crooning falsetto Mower sings “Thought I’d never look back. Running a lie to keep on track.”

The typically quiet and humble artist recognised what he had captured in the song, and named it appropriately—a dime, as in a perfect ten. “I just remember being like, that’s a dime. I got my dime,” said Callum.

Serebii also dropped a video for his most recent single 'Verrans Corner'. In the endearing new video, Mower is shrunken to the size of a pea and sent out floating on a toy sailing boat, looking every bit like the skipper for top local sailing team Emirates Team New Zealand. Listen to both singles and download/stream the full album Dime below.

For his second full-length LP and most realised 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.

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.”

Special thanks to NZ On Air for supporting the release of Dime.

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