Oscar Scheller and Lily Allen express all the existential angst you feel when you’re waiting to hear back from someone and your phone is dying on Scheller’s new track, “1%.” “Three dots, they can mean anything,” he sings of the ominous “someone’s typing” glyph on most phones early in the song, over a plucky backdrop.
Meanwhile, after the “phone dying” song chimes in, Allen explains her tentativeness to reply to him as she sings about how her relationship with Scheller was “no strings attached” and how he has trumped up the idea of their love in his head. “Don’t understand what you meant,” the sing together in the chorus. “Let me know now, ’cause I’m only on one percent.”
The song will appear on Scheller’s upcoming album, HTTP404, which is due out September 6th. The record features collaborations with many of the artists Scheller has worked with as a songwriter and producer, including Pawws, Vera Hotsauce, Jevon, and Havelock.
For Allen, he based “1%” on a somewhat true story. “I wrote this song after getting really lost in the suburbs of Stockholm on my way back from the studio ’cause my phone died,” he told The Fader. “It was inspired mostly by a conversation I was having with a girl who was taking ages to reply when I was on one percent. Then I made friends with Lily and thought she’d sound really good on it which she does.”
Allen put out her most recent album, No Shame, last year. She told Rolling Stone she was especially proud of the song “Cake” on the album because it was optimistic. “I’d been really fucking depressed for the past few years, so yeah, [it’s been hard to be optimistic],” she said. “I mean, it was a relief, not because of it being good for the album, but personally. It’s just like, ‘Oh, I haven’t written something that makes me want to slit my wrists. It must mean that the light at the end of the tunnel is making itself apparent or the horizon is getting closer or whatever.’”