There are songs that sound like they were built in the light, and then there are songs like ‘Human Bean Instruction Manual’, the kind that feel like they’ve been carefully gathered from the corners of a dim bedroom, reconstructed out of old voicemails, broken keys, and a vague but pressing sense of dread.
Pickle Darling, the project of Christchurch’s Lukas Mayo, has always operated at a remove from convention. On ‘Human Bean Instruction Manual’ - which follows recent single ‘Massive Everything’ - they return with a song that’s more like a signal flare from a life stage no one prepared us for. “I just turned 30 and there’s no damn manual for this,” Mayo says. “Transitioning out of being a young adult in 2025 is like suddenly landing on a hostile planet our bodies haven’t adapted to.” The result is a track that’s equal parts anxious transmission and quiet communion—a fuzzy, deeply human dispatch from the edge of adulthood.
This is not a song about finding answers, but about relishing in the ambiguity. As Mayo puts it: “Everything we thought was important doesn’t mean shit. Everything is out to attack us, so all we can do is form our alliances and hang on tight.”
In a musical landscape dominated by gloss and churn, ‘Human Bean Instruction Manual’ reminds us of the power of staying weird and staying soft. It’s a song that doesn’t resolve so much as persists tenderly.
"This was one that I built from early fragments I had recorded years ago, which I then stripped for parts and assembled into a new song," Lukas says of the track. "I always write with a kind of dream logic and never towards any sort of end goal, but I was on the cusp of turning 30 when I wrote this song and I remember feeling completely lost and unprepared and wishing there were some kind of manual. Lots of stressed out dreams, fears of never being able to afford a house or never being able to retire, realising there’s no steady path to a comfortable future, you just need to form your alliances and see how far through this life you can get! I realise a near 7 minute song about being stressed about money isn’t really fun cool sexy playlist material, but that’s Pickle Darling."