From the Massachusetts Tiny Desk: FifteenØeight reveals a swirling synth prayer

There were nearly 250 entries from Massachusetts to this year's NPR Tiny Desk Contest. Five panelists — Alisa Amador, Noble, Scarlet Keys, Victoria Wasylak and Amelia Mason — were tasked with choosing a favorite. But it's hard to pick just one. So as we prepare to reveal the panel's top choice, we're highlighting entries that left an impact.

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To watch FifteenØeight’s Tiny Desk entry is to step inside a sacred space. There’s a mystical quality to the video, as Boston bandmates Daphne Eleftheriadou and Tomer Oron sit face-to-face in a dimly-lit room, their features highlighted by little more than a pair of lit dripping red candlesticks, a neon sign of clasped hands, and the indigo glow of the city outside their window. As they launch into their song “TRUTHFULLY,” Eleftheriadou’s feather-soft vocals careen between Oron’s swelling waves of synthesizer, evoking ripples of yearning and ecstasy.

The entry’s innate sense of intimacy and unconventional flow made the submission a fast favorite for WBUR judges, one of which even likened the song to an epic movie soundtrack. But for FifteenØeight, the song resembles something far more personal.

“‘TRUTHFULLY,’ to me, is almost like a prayer,” Eleftheriadou said. “It’s trying to understand things I don’t understand, a cry for someone to bring answers, and tell me everything’s okay.”

The song is the anchor — and title track — of FifteenØeight’s July album, an entrancing web of deep house, synth-pop and experimental indie that’s the culmination of their four years as collaborators. Eleftheriadou, from Berkeley, California, and Oron, who hails from Herzliya, Israel, first connected in 2021 as students at the Berklee College of Music in the same music technology course. After meeting over a Zoom class, Eleftheriadou sent Oron a DM inviting him to collaborate on a song, which would eventually become “Unspoken Words” from their 2023 project “the End of the Beginning.”

Two albums, countless singles, and one Lollapalooza performance later, the duo describe themselves as best friends who are “addicted to creating the universe that is FifteenØeight.” Among their swirling cosmos of synth, FifteenØeight designed “TRUTHFULLY” to be different, even by the standards of their typical genre-fusing ethos.

“We wanted to create a synth part that could stand its own with very minimal production,” Oron noted. “It’s one of the few songs we have centering around the vocals. When we recorded the video submission, we knew we wanted to capture that intimacy by adding only the synth part, as opposed to a whole band.”

That same synth part — a rapturous chord progression — caused the lyrics to flow from Eleftheriadou “almost effortlessly” when writing material for their July album. “If I lay my head down to rest, please say you’ll handle the rest,” she sings, her tone caught between a plea and a declaration of faith for the future.

“I don’t know what it was about that night, but when [Oron] played it on the Prophet [synthesizer], we felt everything in the room stop,” she recalled.

The final result, a breathtaking communion of prayer and passion, was so emotive that FifteenØeight felt it was the clear choice for their Tiny Desk entry. That same emotional resonance impressed WBUR’s panel of judges immediately.

“We hoped this video would evoke a feeling of hope and provoke internal dialogue,” Oron said. “It is so easy to feel isolated and alone in your thoughts, we hope through watching this someone would feel safe and seen.”