There will come a day when I'll listen to songs from the forthcoming SVIIB album and manage not to cry. That day is not today.
Bittersweet, but overwhelmingly beautiful.
Kim Taylor Bennett, for Noisey:
Nine songs strong, their forthcoming album, SVIIB, is a slim, but supremely compelling collection, and in so many ways its completion and eventual release in February 2016 is a victory. For the most part, it sounds like one too. For instance, joyous album opener “Ablaze” clearly maps the thigh-tingling thrill of Alejandra and Benjamin’s first connection while introducing the record’s recurrent lyrical imagery: embers, flames, fires, the night sky, the stars, awakened inspiration. And of course love. She calls it her most blatant love song. “Our whole life together is that song.” Similarly at the record’s close stands “This Is Our Time,” melancholic, yet utterly uplifting too, it’s a love letter to New York in the early 2000s when the city was humming with possibility and all the best music was coming out of dives like the Mercury Lounge and Brownies. “That feeling we both felt when we moved to New York is that same feeling you feel when you fall in love, you’re just like—I can do anything, I’m all powerful, this world is working with me. It’s on my side,” she says smiling.
From thisispolica.com, Poliça announce new album 'United Crushers':
The new album builds on POLIÇA’s signature synthesizer and percussion-heavy sounds with more complex arrangements and a bigger, crisper hi-fi punch due to the new approach they took to writing and recording: together, all in the same room. There's a tighter groove to these songs and a more vulnerable quality to them, especially in Leaneagh's singing. Her impressive vocal range is consistently on display throughout, beautifully raw and less electronically effected than on previous recordings.
The themes found and explored on United Crushers are heavily political and deeply personal with thick references to social injustice, self-doubt and isolation, the rapidly increasing urban decline in gentrification, overcoming music industry machinations, and finding true and honest love in the wake of it all. Even at its darkest, the record is musically the band's most upbeat and celebratory. It is a weapon meant to empower the weak, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised.
There's a London show in February too.
Magnificent news.
A matter of some significance.
Emma Garland for NOISEY:
The hardest battle Boucher faces is the struggle to be recognised as both the public-facing pop star, Grimes, and the technical mastermind behind the scenes. An architect of her own illusion, she's always handled every aspect of the production and packaging of her work, and the same goes for her new album. Boucher wrote, produced, performed and engineered everything, designed the artwork - and Art Angels also welcomes a new range of instruments into the Grimes repertoire, including guitar, keys, drums, ukulele and violin, which she learned to play for the record, plus 14 unique illustrations to accompany each track.
An excellent in depth feature.
Team Me, announcing that they're splitting after their Norwegian tour via Facebook:
It is with great sadness, but also a bit of relief, we are now pulling the breaks on the Team Me train and say that’s that. The reasons are many, but not important right now. As they say, all things come to an end at some point.
Looking back, we’ve had an amazing time, our lives have been forever changed by all the great experiences we’ve had. We’re extremely lucky to have had the chance to travel around the world to play our music, and to have met so many wonderful people.
Aww. I thought they were fab.