Marian Hill
Marian Hill is a Philadelphian electronic duo, which consists of vocalist Samantha Gongol and Jeremy Lloyd. The pair co-write their own music, with their style combining modern pop and R&B with blues and jazz. They describe their music in three words as “classic bass sway,” noting influences including Ella Fitzgerald and Drake. Marian Hill has been described as the sexiest new band on the scene.
The duo talked with Interview Magazine about their songwriting during their high school years, and specific things that inspire them to write songs:
On a general level, we tend to start with some sort of instrumentals that I’ll be playing around with. […] Songs about relationships are always a go-to. Even though every song might seem like it’s about craving a man, we want to make sure we explore nuances and the delicate side of that process, not just being sex-crazed. We’re very careful with our lyrics.
After being released as a single alongside “Lips,” their hit song “Got It” was featured in a Taco Bell commercial.
They have released two EPs to date, their most recent being Sway, which received positive acclaim as “compelling and sonically pleasant.”
During the first few months of 2016, Marian Hill released various singles leading up to their debut full-length record, Act One.
2017 saw them release Act One (The Complete Collection), which featured songs from ACT ONE, as well as new tracks like the remix of “Down” which featured Big Sean.
In 2018, the duo released UNUSUAL, their second album. In an interview with Atwood Magazine, they said:
There were two main conversations we had before we really started working on the record. The first one was when we were on tour for “Down" and I remember us both talking about how we wanted to make stuff that was weirder, and stuff that was poppier, and try to see if we could do that at the same time, and push ourselves in both competing directions. And then a few months later, basically when the election happened, I know we were sitting in and starting to write the music, thinking about what we felt like we needed to do as artists, and we really wanted to make people feel strong. […] We’ve always sort of championed female empowerment, but I guess we’ve never been explicitly asked, and then as Jeremy said, with the election, when we were talking about it in our conversations, we really wanted to make sure that we really drove that home, and we just wrote songs that were a little bit stronger, and a bit more overtly powerful. And also in our songs, there’s a couple that feature – because we’ve always written about relationships, too – there’s a couple songs that feature a twist at the end; start as one thing, end as another. So we wanted to reflect sort of more complex relationships with the narratives.