Dahlia Sleeps - Guyville

Dahlia Sleeps - Too Good To Hide.

London based duo Dahlia Sleeps today announce their long-awaited debut album, Overflow. Two years in the making and almost 6 years since their debut single, producer/writer Luke Hester and singer/writer Lucy Hill will release Overflow in two parts – the first of which will be out on October 19th, with the B-side to follow early in 2022.

Accompanying the album announcement is new single "Too Good To Hide". The track unfurls beautifully; partnering smoky atmospherics and soaring guitars with rich live percussion and a haunting string section, "Too Good To Hide" dissects how mental ill-health can hold us back and keep us repeating the same painful patterns, as the song builds elegantly towards its stunning crescendo.

Of the new single, singer Lucy Hill said: “Too Good To Hide is a song about running towards turmoil instead of towards the light. So often it is a battle to build the life we want because trauma or mental health issues keep us where we are. This is the first song on the record that touches on mental health, a theme that features heavily in forthcoming songs. And as with all these songs, this one ends with hope, something that exists for all of us as we learn to love ourselves and overcome our pasts.”

With eclectic influences ranging from electronic acts including MOVEMENT, Autechre and Burial to the lyrically poetic works of Florence + the Machine, Radiohead and The National, Dahlia Sleeps shift seamlessly between genres; from dance to electronic to pop.

Dahlia Sleeps' new material and forthcoming full length brings a new weight sonically, depicting a new kind of freedom for the duo – from managing and coming to terms with mental health problems to experiencing love in all its forms despite them.

 

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Guyville - Nothing.

Guyville is a Los Angeles based duo comprised of its founding members, Kat Hamilton and Emily Hulslander. The pair craft songs that combine elements of 90s rock, pop and country. As their name suggests, the legacy of Liz Phair brought these two powerful women together in songwriting bliss. The duo strikes the perfect chord with Hulslander's intelligent pop approach and Hamilton’s confessional lyricism.

Guyville was formed during your usual Los Angeles writing session in the Valley. What was unusual, was the easy flow and chemistry between the two prolific writers. Within a few hours, the duo had written their first song “Should’ve Never Dated”. Emily Hulslander had already made a strong name for herself in LA songwriting circles, but was struggling to find another writer who she could relax into the process with. Kat Hamilton was newer to LA, but felt unfulfilled as a writer. On that pivotal day, Emily and Kat found common ground in their failed relationships, artistic journeys and the women of the 90s.

This connection is highlighted in their debut Guyville single, “Nothing”. The end of summer jam combines elements of indie rock and 90s girl anthems with a sprinkle of Shania Twain. “Nothing” celebrates the wonderful post- breakup feeling of absolutely nothing for your ex. In the music video, Hamilton and Hulslander frolic in rose gardens and dance along sandy beaches. The result is a bubbly, tongue in cheek ode to getting over it and moving on.

 

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Favours - Susto - Seasurfer

Favours - Call Me.

Favours are made up of Jacq Andrade and Alex Zen. They released their first LP, Made to Wait, in 2020. It was recorded at Candle Recording Studios in Toronto. Their song “Stowaway” was featured on Netflix and CBC Gem. 

Recently, Favours joined forces with Jacq’s brother, Mark Andrade and built a home recording studio in a former halfway house in Mimico. Throughout the pandemic, Favours tracked a ton of music in their home studio. Their EP, Left Behind, will be released in 2021 and it features a fresh dreampop, new-wave sound inspired by their shared love of the DIY post-punk feel of Robert Rental. 

The band collaborated with a strong team for this upcoming EP. They enlisted the talents of Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning who plays bass on the EP, the engineering chops of Tallies’ Dylan Franklin who engineered the drums and bass, and the mixing prowess of Alexandre Bonenfont.

Favours · CALL ME

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Susto - Summertime.

Susto will return with Time in the Sun on October 29th via New West Records. The 11-song set was produced and engineered by Wolfgang Zimmerman (Band of Horses) in the band’s hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Time in the Sun follows their critically acclaimed 2019 studio album Ever Since I Lost My Mind which Paste raved was “a resounding triumph.” 

The joy of birth, the closure of death, the warmth of true friendship, and the future rotate on the axis of the band’s New West Records debut. Frontman Justin Osborne distills this ebb and flow into songs underpinned by lyrical eloquence, unpredictable dynamics, and a thoroughly alive rock and roll spirit.

Prior to entering the studio, Osborne became a father and midway through recording, lost his own father to cancer. Osborne says, “Because I had begun writing when I found out I was going to be a dad, these events were the biggest inspirations for the record. It felt like I was in between the beginning and end of life. Up until my own father passed away, I felt like it was an album about new life and becoming a parent. His passing shifted the narrative towards the cyclical nature of life, death, and new births.”

 

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Seasurfer - Drifting.

Shortly after Seasurfer’s acclaimed third album “Zombies” has also been released on vinyl in addition to the earlier CD edition, the Hamburg-based dream pop duo comes up with a new version of the song “Drifting”. The track turned out to be one of the fan’s favourites on the record, so Dirk Knight and Apolonia decided to produce an alternate mix.   

However, the song still captivates due to the rich atmosphere and the dark elegance of the floating synth sounds which reveal a blissful 80s feeling. This applies all the more so for the “Extended Single Mix” – almost 12 minutes long and probably one of the most impressing reworks in the band’s history.

Dirk Knight explains: "For me “Drifting” is the song with the coolest bass of the whole album “Zombies”. For the first time I recorded all the basses by myself and learned to love playing this instrument. Basses are extremely important to us and determine the harmonies and melodies, similar to how Simon Gallup (The Cure), Peter Hook (Joy Division, New Order) and Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins) are doing it. For the single and the extended mix we let the drums run straight through to make the song even more mesmerizing.

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Helven - Áine Rose Daly - Juniper Stone - Sitrekin

Helven - u my homie.

Emerging Norwegian alt-pop artist Helven has announced that she will release her debut EP volume 1 via Jansen Records on Jan 14th 2022. Hailing from the Norwegian countryside, Helven, aka 21-year-old Jenny Bakke,  recently moved to Oslo to pursue her career in music. The up-and-coming musician has a talent for fusing together honest, true and contemporary lyrics with inspiration from pop music of the past, capturing the experience of life as a 21-year-old woman in the 2020’s.

Inspired by the many lessons her brother, who has autism and Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, has taught her, Helven is on a mission to wear her heart on her sleeve. Each of the five tracks that make up volume 1 focuses on a different emotion that she has struggled to express in the past: envy, care, love, sadness and frustration. Attaching a particular feeling to the autobiographical stories she tells in her music has helped her find a true sense of self. Her message to her generation is simple. “In order to survive in this increasingly chaotic world, we need to listen to our feelings more, and express them proudly.”

On lead single ‘u my homie’, Helven delivers her signature smoky vocals atop laidback trip-hop beats. The lyrics were pulled from text messages and notes Helven wrote whilst helping her childhood friend through a tough time. "It's about the journey we had together, what it is like to help a friend, the ups and downs, and the strength of the friendship in adversity" she explains. "I used texts from that period to write the lyrics. It's all the things we used to say to each other during the toughest times, without anyone else understanding what they meant. Instead of saying 'I love you, you'll get through this', we said 'I know you, u my homie'".

Jansen Records · Helven - u my homie (9AM Records

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Áine Rose Daly - Places.

Having already made her mark in the acting world of late, earning a regular part in the hit Amazon Prime series Hanna, emerging singer and songwriter Áine Rose Daly is now staking her claim on the music world as she delivers the wonderfully bright and uplifting new single ‘Places’.

Channelling a rich and dynamic alt-pop aesthetic throughout, ‘Places’ sees the artist deliver a bold and shimmering new offering, layered in rich and euphoric textures. With a light and atmospheric production embedded around her sweet and soaring voice, her new offering showcases her as a strong and powerful artist, brimming with stellar potential.

Speaking about the new release, she said, “I wrote this song a long time ago about my struggles with my mental health and how, at the time, I felt like it was holding me back from doing what I wanted to do with my life.”

Áine Daly is a London-based actor/singer/songwriter. Born and raised in Jersey, Channel Islands to Irish parents and coming from a long lineage of musicians and creatives, Áine has always been surrounded by music and arts.

The last few years have seen Áine’s acting career flourish, having been cast in multiple feature length films and most notably playing a series regular in Amazon Prime's “HANNA”. Outside of her acting career however, Aine has always maintained her love for songwriting and considers it a major creative outlet for herself.

Áine Rose Daly · Places

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Juniper Stone - Patterns.

Juniper Stone is the solo musical project of Brisbane based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Damien Vincent. His musical style has been described as a blend of Lo-Fi Indie Pop and Neo Soul.

After collaborating with many acts in the Brisbane music scene and graduating from Musical Industry College, Damien is now focusing his efforts into his own project with his upcoming debut singles “Patterns” and “Moonchild.”

With plans to release a follow-up EP and play live in 2021, Juniper Stone is set to be an exciting journey.

 

 

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Sitrekin - Open Chest.

Danish artist Kirstine Stubbe Teglbjærg is off to an historic start as she launches a new project under artist name Sitrekin. She is the voice behind US Grammy nominated Twilight Saga soundtrack hit song ‘Eyes on Fire’, which has racked up close to 100m streams, and now releases her debut solo track in English since her departure from the award-winning Danish group Blue Foundation. The track is entitled ‘Open Chest’ and is a spellbinding, infectious love song. Earlier this year, the track was chosen to be the perfect sonic launchpad for Apple Music’s new lossless format available on iTunes using Dolby Atmos.

‘Open Chest’ was released exclusively for Apple Music on July 1st in their new revolutionary Spatial Audio/Dolby Atmos format and now gets a full release via all other major digital platforms. The track was mixed by Dyre Gormsen in the legendary West London Eastcote Studios – one of the most important and influential of music studios in the world, where artists such as Massive Attack, Depeche Mode, Adele and Arctic Monkeys created some of their greatest works.

Dyre explains, “Open Chest is mixed by myself and was the first track I put into Dolby Atmos as an experiment to begin with, but it became clear that it was a perfect media for Kirstine’s music and what we were looking for all the time, as a way to demonstrate how you are able to move objects around as the music is very element based. We used the mix to play for Dolby who were instantly very excited by what they heard and gave approval for this to be the launch track for this new groundbreaking format.”

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The Ninth Wave - The Catenary Wires - Adna - Yes

The Ninth Wave - Piece and Pound Coins.

Glasgow's The Ninth Wave release new single "Piece and Pound Coins", a new taster of their next full length body of work, due 2022.

A compelling piece, "Piece and Pound Coins" was produced by the band themselves and mixed by Max Heyes (Massive Attack, Doves, Lucia & The Best Boys, Primal Scream). Amidst a distinctly chilling atmosphere, rolling piano lines weave their way through chugging percussion with the track standing as a stark examination of grief and loss.

Speaking on the release of "Piece and Pound Coins", singer Haydn Park-Patterson said: "I wrote this song about a friend who passed away a number of years ago. I’ve never really felt like I wanted to/could write about him for a number of reasons, but I guess the main one was because that for a long time, I wouldn’t have known what to write. Writing about death is a world away from writing about heartache/love/friendships because there’s nobody to listen to the song and wonder “is that about me?”. It’s a strange feeling, to write a song about someone that you know can’t ever hear it. 

The song also touches on the thought of wondering what he’d be up to now, 5 years on in his life, and how weird a thought it is that we’ve all continued on with our lives but his had a start and end point, and that’s it. No more memories to be made. The song also lets out a bit of confused anger that I felt not long after he passed, as I watched how a few people reacted to his death and the way in which they talked about it. That’s the meaning behind the line 'death makes some people sad and some people ugly / and some people took your name for their own sake'. I like to think that he’d like the song, as he was one of the most supportive and positive-minded people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing."

The track is released alongside a stunning video directed by Rianne White. She commented: "I feel completely in awe of this song and Haydn’s ability to frame such an immense feeling. Embraced by the catharsis of nature, the heights of grief and identity are expressed through a journey of Haydn’s internal growth accompanied by a symbolically poignant lone wolf. I like to think of Hayden and the wolf as one, both finding their way back to their truest states of being with wild untamed hearts of companionship and eternal loyalty. "

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The Catenary Wires - Always On My Mind.

Taken from their acclaimed album Birling Gap, The Catenary Wires’ new single is accompanied by a brand-new video. The Catenary Wires combine Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey (both ex-Heavenly, Talulah Gosh) with Fay Hallam (Makin’ Time) Andy Lewis (The Paul Weller Group, Pimlico) and Ian Button (Death in Vegas, Papernut Cambridge).

'Always On My Mind' is a track for late summer.   It’s a love song full of warmth and emotion.  An old photograph taken on a late summer holiday transports us back to a perfect moment when a relationship first started.  But there’s bittersweet regret in there too.   In the photograph, the sun’s rays were still warm, but they were getting longer; the colder Autumn evenings weren’t far away.  Did the relationship survive the winter?  And now, is it that person in the photo the one we are still in love with, or are they long gone – leaving us with just a memory embedded in a faded old picture?

The song and the video are celebrations of the fact that The Catenary Wires have evolved from a duo into a five-piece band, where everyone contributes to the rich instrumentation and the blissful vocal harmonies.  The video was filmed by all five members of the band, taking it in turns in the practice room – the first time they’d all been together since the start of lockdown.

 

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Adna - Darkness Born in Youth.

Following on from the release of her stunning 2017 full-length ‘Closure’, an album which was lauded across numerous outlets, Swedish-born but Berlin-based singer songwriter Adna has now unveiled the details behind her next LP ‘Black Water’ with the release of her latest single ‘Darkness Born In Youth’.

Much like her work to date, ‘Black Water’ sees her channel a rich and ambient direction, filled with warm and textured aesthetics. With her smooth and seductive voice layered over a heady mix of bright and enticing production, her latest collection looks set to become one of her most praised to date.

Adna’s latest offering follows on from the unfiltered emotion of ‘Don’t Know’, giving us a clear insight into the understated balladry that we can expect on this forthcoming full-length. Conjuring up more of the raw and poignant direction she is known for, ‘Darkness Born In Youth’ spotlights her soulful presence. Recorded in one-take, the track is accented by softly plucked guitar and her trademark soaring vocal.

Speaking about the new release, she says, “It’s hard not to sound pretentious about it, but this is really just a very honest improvisation that I recorded for my own memory in case I would forget about it. The title refers to the sensitivity I often find myself thinking of as a burden… I guess most people have had to end relationships, wishing it could have been with someone else instead.”

To date, Adna has made three beautifully woeful albums; 2014’s ‘Night’, 2015’s’ Run, Lucifer’ and the album ‘Closure’ in 2017. Supporting ‘Closure’, Adna played a packed Eurosonic showcase in 2017 and toured throughout Germany, UK, France and Scandinavia in the months since its release. Adna’s music has had more than 50 million streams on the large DSPs, and has had her melancholic, lo-fi work compared to the likes of Bon Iver and Daughter.

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Yes - Dare To Know.

Yes, who are Steve Howe, Alan White, Geoff Downes, Jon Davison and Billy Sherwood, recently announced they will release their new studio album The Quest on InsideOutMusic/Sony Music on 1st October 2021. 

The album was produced by Steve Howe. "Much of the music was written in late 2019 with the rest in 2020. We commissioned several orchestrations to augment and enhance the overall sound of these fresh new recordings, hoping that our emphasis on melody, coupled with some expansive instrumental solo breaks, keeps up the momentum for our listeners,” said Steve.

Steve Howe comments: “Dare To Know presents a guitar theme played within many different arrangements, with different chord structures and altered textures. The 'idea' mentioned in the first verse gets described later as an awakening to the subtle goings on within our bodies and mind, all geared to nature's scheme of things, all fluctuating and rearranging according to the principles of life, as we know it. The centrepiece leaves the orchestra alone to elaborate and develop the way the theme is heard, then augments the closing minutes of the song as it rests, with an acoustic guitar cadenza.”

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