Seattle, WA · ambient folk

SYML

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Hushed piano-folk for held breath — 'Where's My Love' softness, cinematic quiet built for closed eyes.

SYML is the solo project of Brian Fennell, a musician based in the Seattle area who previously played in the band Barcelona. The name is Welsh for "simple," a reference to Fennell's Welsh ancestry: he was born in Issaquah, Washington, in 1983 to teenage Welsh immigrant parents and was adopted soon after birth.

Fennell studied classical piano as a child, sometimes playing for residents at his grandmother's retirement home. Raised in a Christian household, he stopped following the religion as a teenager and began writing his own songs at eighteen, the first written as a way of coping with a schoolmate's death. He later studied music education at Seattle Pacific University.

Before SYML, Fennell sang and played guitar in Barcelona, an indie band formed in 2005 whose debut album, Absolutes, was picked up and reissued by Universal Records in 2009. The music he makes as SYML is built around piano, restrained vocals and ambient textures, closer to hushed folk than to conventional singer-songwriter fare.

His song "Where's My Love" brought the project wider attention after being used in the show Teen Wolf, going on to be certified platinum and turning up in film and television including Adrift, Shadowhunters and Chemical Hearts. Much of his catalogue has followed a similar path: spare, slow-moving material that keeps finding an audience through screen placement.

Fennell released his self-titled debut album in 2019, followed by the EP Dim in 2021, written around his father's cancer diagnosis. His second album, The Day My Father Died, appeared in 2023, produced by Phil Ek with contributions from Lucius, Guy Garvey, Sara Watkins and Charlotte Lawrence. He has also collaborated with Lana Del Rey, whose song "Paris, Texas" samples one of his instrumentals.

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ambient folk