“Anywhere” is a song about leaving, written right before the leaving happened. Anna McClellan wrote it in Omaha, just before she moved in 2023, and it “sits slightly outside the rest of the record” — the second single from her upcoming six-track EP South of Dodge, out November 20 on Exploding In Sound. The EP is, in her words, “a meditation about learning how to leave,” and its title comes from Dodge Street, the artery cutting through Omaha. This track is the moment before the turn.

The collaboration is the story. McClellan asked Philly producer and percussionist Gloorp — Garrett Burke — to work with her, and the result pairs her introspective folk with his “mutated IDM pop”: Rhodes and synth from McClellan, a beat from Gloorp, theremin from Adam Roberts, engineered and mixed by Roberts, produced by McClellan and Roberts, mastered by Carl Saff. “I just asked him to make a sick beat and he was like, ok I got you,” she said — and the beat he made is the song’s secret weapon, a frenetic, dizzying backbeat under a vocal that spills its guts about the complexities of change. Side One Track One calls it “bedroom pop… such wondrous effort,” and Consequence made it a staff pick.

McClellan is Omaha-born and now NYC-based, a DIY indie rocker since her 2015 debut album Fire Flames, and South of Dodge is her first EP for Exploding In Sound, following Space, you big cloud on Father/Daughter in May. She’s also been lending guest vocals to eight songs on Greg Freeman’s upcoming All Set The Bone. But “Anywhere” is hers alone — a refined, raw split of a song, and the sound of an artist standing at the edge of a move, looking both ways, and choosing to go.

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Bandcamp — South of Dodge (EP)