Echo Ladies - Charlotte Carpenter
Last month, Malmö, Sweden shoegaze/dreampop trio Echo Ladies announced that they have signed to Rama Lama Records/Gazehop Records and will release their second album Lillies on 8th September 2023.
Commenting on the track, the band say: “‘This is a song about the fear of getting stuck in life, doing repetitive things, please others and putting yourself second all the time. The song's name, Fabrik, actually means Factory in swedish. We wanted the sound of the synths and the drums to remind of some sort of big factory, a repetitive loop of big sounds that shaped a rhythm.”
Echo Ladies are Matilda Bogren, Mattis Andersson and Joar Andersén—three school-friends who, after playing together in a few different bands, realised that they worked best on their own. In 2014, after looking for “a name that represented our sound”, they became Echo Ladies, partly inspired by the name of the drum machine from another of their favourite bands, Echo & The Bunnymen (though their own drum machine, for now, remains nameless).
Following a quiet spell for the band while the rest of the world turned upside down, Echo Ladies are now proudly returning with their second album Lillies, recorded and mastered by Joakim Lindberg at Studio Sickan in Malmö, and following on from their acclaimed 2018 debut Pink Noise on Sonic Cathedral, which was one of Rough Trade’s albums of the year.
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East Midland’s singer-songwriter Charlotte Carpenter announces details of her long-awaited debut album A Modern Rage on 6th October 2023, and drops the album’s second teaser ‘Not Good Enough.’
‘Not Good Enough’ is a heart-wrenching song about the effects of toxic people on our own self-worth. It explores a real-life working relationship Charlotte had whilst in her early 20’s with an older, more experienced producer.
“It was my first experience of the industry, and I was made to feel it was an opportunity of a lifetime” explains Charlotte. “I was also made to feel I was being protected from the industry too, but as the years went on, I realised this wasn’t the case at all. I was playing to somebody’s else’s rules and expectations of what I should be; I didn’t know who I was. There is so much sadness in this song, and a yearning to find myself again.”
This experience was a catalyst for Charlotte’s deeply personal, at times raw, and cathartic debut album A Modern Rage, which touches upon power structures in the music industry, and society in general, which are detrimental to women, and also explores how life’s profound experiences are navigated – in Charlotte’s case, loss, love, addiction, mental health, and more recently the pandemic - within the often claustrophobic and pressurised confines of womanhood.
Musically A Modern Rage pays homage to Charlotte’s favourite artists from the 70’s through to the 00’s, from Elvis to Avril Lavigne, The Killers to Sheryl Crow, with the accomplished album spanning rock, pop, blues, with subtle country twangs and moments of old soul.
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