Rhye Combats Quarantine With Slinky Funk Single 'Beautiful'

Mike Milosh, the singer and multi-instrumentalist behind , mixes chamber pop and muted disco on his new single “Beautiful.”

The track starts with a throb of strings before cohering around a sharp beat and muscular bass line, distantly echoing solo Bryan Ferry tracks from the early Eighties. Milosh’s lyrics move between simple entreaties — “You’re beautiful/Help me breathe” — and statements about his own qualifications as a potential partner: “Just look at my face/Oh I’ve come a long way.”

In a statement, Milosh positioned his new song as a light antidote to the stress of global lockdown. “As we all share in this collective crazy moment that is quarantine, there are many ways to deal with the isolation, many ways we can truly fall into ourselves,” he said. “For me, celebrating the beauty that is my partner has been a huge inspiration and a saving grace. Beauty is something we truly need to be open to in this moment.”

Rhye put out a debut album, Woman, in 2013; it has earned nearly 70 million streams in the U.S. to date, according to the analytics company Alpha Data. After five years of silence, Rhye has been especially active recently, releasing Blood in 2018 and Spirit last year. “I don’t want to wait five years for another album,” Milosh said in 2018. “… Why would I stop?”