Debuting only this January and already dropping their first album grief cake by August, NEW LORE is moving like a storm front, not a band. In less than a year, the all-girl electropop trio has carved themselves into one of the rising OPM names to watch. Today, they release a NEW LORE version of “Paumanhin,” originally a soundtrack piece from Samantha Lee’s Netflix Original Sleep With Me. This one hits different. This one is theirs. And the country is finally starting to understand what they’ve become.
NEW LORE is art you feel before you understand it, a fashionable, emotionally dangerous act blurring the line between gallery walls and the dance floor. Their music is glitch and confession, ache and architecture, built on synths that shimmer and lyrics that bruise. Spotify knew it early, placing grief cake on .ORG, Poses, and New Music Friday across Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But perhaps the clearest snapshot of who they are becoming comes from music writer Gabriel Bagahansol of the Flying Lugaw, who said that NEW LORE’s rebirth “burst with a renewed sense of energy, as though a floodgate had been opened for a creative catharsis.” Their shift from the sedate identity of No Lore into this sharper, weirder, bolder form wasn’t an aesthetic upgrade. It was a survival instinct.
“Paumanhin” is the quiet knife in their discography. Written years ago as Tita Halaman’s first Tagalog song, it’s a slow, trembling autopsy of a love that didn’t die dramatically, just slipped through the cracks of timing and silence. The track moves like memory: restrained, soft, unblinking. In this NEW LORE version, you hear the ache of an ending that never exploded, only evaporated. A heartbreak that lingers in new beginnings, shifting shape but never disappearing. It’s ethereal pop with a pulse you feel in your ribs, a soft violence wrapped in synth. Under Off The Record x Sony Music Philippines, NEW LORE delivers a version that feels less like a cover and more like a reclamation.
