“The Emerald Schmoe,” the latest single from Illinois’ Survival Float, is a lovely exercise in duality. Sprightly yet underpinned by unusual time signatures. Airy yet filled with horns, drums, keyboards, guitars and more. Bright yet elegiac, particularly in regard to the piano that forms the song’s backbone. Over the course of the song, Jess Hal (the one-man band behind Survival Float) blends contrasting ingredients into a sweetly cohesive whole. Fittingly, atop it all is the mellifluous yet rasp-tinged timbre of Hal’s voice.

Picking up right where the one-man-band approach of “The Emerald Schmoe” leaves off, Hal has been hard at work mixing, producing, and playing almost all of the instruments on Surival Float’s debut, self-titled album, due out this summer. As we await the full compendium of Hal’s wonderfully constructed pop/rock, check out “The Emerald Schmoe” below.