Choir of Young Believers

One band on my bucket list that I haven't yet seen is Denmark's Choir Of Young Believers, but they just dropped a new album, Grasque, and it wouldn't be too far-fetched to expect them to tour behind it this year, although so far they've only announced a handful of European dates.

Album opener Olimpiyskiy sounds like a symphonic overture, and the abrupt end suggests that the songs on Grasque fade into one another and that the new album might best be experienced by listening to all the way through, rather than as a bunch of singles on random play.

Regarding the album, frontman Jannis Noya Makrigiannis said.  "I must admit, one of the things I worried about was ‘What will people think?’ With almost all of these songs, I had been in doubt. Some, I felt, were too poppy, others too experimental — some didn’t even feel like songs, but more like trips, or feelings. Some even had Danish and Greek lyrics. But now, it’s all Choir of Young Believers to me, and it feels great to have pushed the walls around the band, giving it a bit more space. It’s weird for me to think about all that doubt — ‘Could I do this? Could I do that?’ I mean, it’s my fucking band. I can do what I want with it. Right?" 

Here's the second track, Serious Lover, which doesn't quite pick up where Olimpiyskiy left off, but still suggests a transition, with the live audience fading into the  background, and Serious Lover itself seems to dissolve right in our ears into whatever the next track has to offer.  

From the two-minute samples you can stream on label Ghostly's web site, the album sounds like it might be a meditation on sultry 80s soul music like Sade and even early George Michaels, and has me eagerly anticipating hearing this whole work through,