Following February’s release of the ‘Forever Was A Feeling’ mixtape, his PMR debut, north London-based producer, multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Daniel Briskin this week releases new track ‘Cash Cow’. Released to coincide with arena dates supporting Tom Grennan, it’s the first true glimpse of this sensational emerging artist’s global ambition, and the first in a series of single releases that’ll take Daniel through to 2022.
With Briskin still under the tutelage of Klaxons founding member Jamie Reynolds, Cash Cow finds Daniel collaborating with hotly-tipped producer Matt Zara, who became a minor sensation during lockdown after he took the top spot in Kenny Beats’ beat battle. A few hours into their first session together Daniel and Matt had created Cash Cow, an invigorating hip-hop-influenced jam with sonic nods to Blueprint-era Jay-Z and lyrics that find Daniel emerging from personal (and global) challenges of the last year with a renewed sense of agency.
“It’s about the idea of standing up to exploitation,” Daniel says, “and about how I was in this dark place, but I’m coming out the other side, and I’m not here to be taken advantage of or turned into a cash cow. In the music world — and everywhere really — you come across a lot of manipulative people but I’m not going to stoop to their levels. I’m going to stay exactly where I am, and who I am. And I know who I am. If people are trying to fuck with me, well… Let them try.”
‘Cash Cow’ is the latest instalment in this distinctive new talent’s journey with PMR, which is set to reach new heights with the release of three further singles in the coming months. This all builds on the ‘Forever Was A Feeling’ mixtape, an immersive body of work recorded with Jamie Reynolds which featured singles like ‘Yellow’ and ‘Boy On The Lake’, the latter identified by Clash Magazine as “a miniature masterpiece”. While that mixtape expertly captured the claustrophobia of late adolescence, Cash Cow and the other forthcoming releases are the sound of Daniel coming out of his shell. As he puts it: “The new music is the sound of me going: ‘Fuck it, I’m 20 years old, why am I not having fun?’ I feel now as if I’ve figured some things out. I feel like I’ve really come into my own.”
Cash Cow’s admirably literal artwork features Daniel with a cow — cardboard, Daniel notes with some dismay, “because we couldn’t fit a real one up the stairs to the photo studio”. The cow, as yet unnamed, now lives in Daniel’s home studio.
