“Is this my afterlife?!” One can only hope what comes after death is as sweet and peppy as Negative 25’s Afterlife?!

Typically reserved for delicate woodland folk music and the occasional party trick, it’s not every day you hear a kalimba used in a pop song. Defying all expectations, brothers and pop duo, Negative 25, kick-off Afterlife?! with a few twangy, music-box notes before the shoulder-shimmying boom-bap beat jumps in. The self-dubbed boy band layer their vibrant vocals over the bubbly arrangement. Though the content reflects on being house-ridden and the feelings of isolation that have come with global quarantine, Afterlife?! gives indie-pop lovers everywhere a reason to be happy.

On the song, Bradley, one half of Negative 25, said:

We sat down to write, looked at each other and said ‘We’ve been in this house so long we might be haunting it.’ The lines between loneliness and boredom with oneself are pretty blurry, so we wrote a song about it.