At restaurants in Hull, the English port city that Richie Culver hails from, payment is typically required ahead of the meal—in case you run away. “When I first moved to London,” the artist tells Document, “I couldn’t believe that you could pay at the end of a meal. That amount of trust felt crazy to me.”

This was the starting point for “Restaurants,” but not the core of it—rather, a piece of the whole. These pieces were made and rearranged not only by Culver, but also by Moor Mother (who’s featured on track) and Josiane M.H. Pozi (who made the video, premiering with Document) and, really, the audience itself. “There are so many layers,” Culver says. “You just have to look for them.”

“There are so many layers. You just have to look for them.”

The track is the first single off Culver’s forthcoming Scream If You Don’t Exist, releasing via Participant Records on November 17. “Restaurants” is emblematic of the whole of the album, as it sees the artist claiming and relinquishing control in the same breath; revisiting his own histories and abandoning them entirely; indulging in his own perspective, and then offering it up to be remade in another’s hands. “I noticed how certain lyrics matched with what sounds like torrential rain in the production—‘when it rains it bangs.’ At least, that was my interpretation of it, as I didn’t hear rain until I heard Moor Mother’s delivery. Josiane then took us into another dimension with the visuals,” Culver explains. “At this point, the track is far from restaurants in Hull.”

Two realities can exist at once, and conflict with one another. “Scream If You Don’t Exist touches on topics around screen addiction, so it’s a vast frame to work within. A heavy and sad topic. A normal, everyday topic. A crippling topic. A really mundane topic. I wanted to make something with a carefully curated spine that everyone could relate to,” Culver says. “The record is camouflaged with noise and heavy wordplay. But at the core, it’s about disconnect and how that’s now seen as connection.”