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Based in Margate, Avantpop shoegazers Sisyphes are made up of former La Houle guitarist and songwriter Geoffrey Papin, Clémentine Blue (Tiger Lion), John Davies (Michael A Grammar, Traams) and Jimi Tormey (Gang).
Taking their cues from the likes of Stereolab, Broadcast and Julien Gasc, they deliver dreamlike pop songs with a touch of French synthwave. Lyrically their literary and philosophical influences shine through – gone are the days when shoegaze lyrics were just a conduit for vocal textures.
The band explain that “Saṃsāra is a Sanskrit word that means "wandering" or "world", with the connotation of cyclic, circuitous change. In short, it is the cycle of death and rebirth.”
Sisyphes’ name is taken from Greek mythology – the deceitful character who has been doomed to push a boulder to the top of a hill for eternity. While perhaps music and art could be categorized as similarly futile, these are the things that get us up in the morning to push our own personal rock once again.
New single ‘Samsara’ is available everywhere on April 3rd 2020 via A Certain Kind Records.
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Singer - Songwriter Josh Kumra returns with a new EP, ‘Pull Me Back In’, out now via ferryhouse. Following up on the recently released singles; the soaring ‘Don’t Know Why’, the confessional ‘I Dare You’ and last year’s intimate ‘Stubborn Love’, the EP is an insight into Josh’s newly found creative freedom. Mostly recorded and produced by Josh in his own studio, the new body of work is an introspective journey through the emotions and mind of a young artist who found himself “falling short of the grand expectations everyone had of me and had almost lost my love for making music completely”, as he candidly concedes.
Whilst the title track ‘Pull Me Back’ is in the artist’s own words; “all about going there to come back, getting lost to be found. For me it's the song that takes the core of the other songs on the EP and brings them together in a simple but an unavoidable way.” Having topped the UK charts and performed on ‘Later… With Jools Holland’ before having released his debut album, the talented artist suddenly found himself with a major record deal and under pressure to capitalise on the sudden exposure brought by his collaboration with Wretch 32 on ‘Don’t Go’, the chart-topping single which reached #1 in the UK upon its release.
After the release of his debut album ‘Good Things Come To Those Who Don’t Wait’ and his international headline tour, Josh struggled with the idea of being the pop star people saw in him. The unexpected publicity meant losing the original idea of “writing music from my heart,” he confesses while talking about the vulnerability and sense of loss he felt. He left London for Tetbury, set up his own recording studio and started writing and recording new music in a safe space, one in which he could develop himself first before trying to please everyone else. A completely different creative process compared to “being sent around to hit makers on a daily basis, baring everything and anything personal to strangers in the hopes of writing a hit song,” recalls Josh on the dark side of the hit making machine.
‘Pull Me Back In’, is a remarkable collection of heart-wrench songs, one that is destined to set Josh as the bonafide singer-songwriter he is.
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Malena Zavala has today shared blissful new track 'Memories Gone', taken from her forthcoming second album La Yarará, to be released April 17 on Yucatan Records.
Mazzy Star-style gothic chamber pop with a South American influence, ‘Memories Gone’ is about “mourning the loss of a memory that has faded away,” comments Zavala, who was born in Argentina but grew up in Hertfordshire. “I wrote it when making my first album, but I wanted to tie it all in with the Latino feel of La Yarará so I stripped it back to vocals and guitar added a ronroco arrangement. The ronroco is an Andean ten stringed guitar-like instrument that has a slight echo and somehow creates its own reverb, and I love the way it sounds on the track.”
The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2018 debut album ‘Aliso’, ‘La Yarará’ cements Zavala as a songwriter with a unique perspective on where she’s from, where she’s headed and where her music can take us. The album draws from the various aspects, colours and shades of Latin music and culture: cumbia, Afro-Cuban, Afro-funk, Andean folk, Argentine folk, bolero-son, and reggaeton, all sung in a mixture of English and Spanish in Zavala’s passport-to-paradise voice.
Zavala recently unveiled a stylish and colourful video for the album’s sinuous title track, current single ‘La Yarará’, premiered by Notion Magazine. ‘La Yarará’ is the third single to be taken from the album following 'En La Noche' and 'I'm Leaving Home'.
After the release of ‘Aliso’ – described as “gently warped and beguilingly melancholy guitar pop” by The Guardian in their 4 star review - Zavala toured all over Europe and the UK supporting Lord Huron, Blanco White, and Men I Trust, before hitting the festival circuit. She then spent three months writing her second album in Tarifa, the southernmost point of Spain.
Zavala and her close circle of collaborators recorded ‘La Yarará’ in two weeks last September at Urchin Studios in London Fields, with Zavala producing and Dani Bennett Spragg (Baxter Dury, The Amazons) engineering.
“It’s a really beautiful, all-wooden studio, which was really important for the sound of this album,” says Zavala. “I wanted it to feel like Buena Vista Social Club. I wanted to play the room, to feel the walls and wooden floors.”
At the heart of the album is ‘Identity’, a song of rootlessness and yearning “that embodies the whole record. It’s about how I feel like I don’t belong to Argentina or England. I’ve just been travelling my whole life,” says Zavala. “So the whole concept is about how, wherever you go and whatever the experiences you have in the cultures you live in, they make up who you are and your character. So I had this idea of a person being about where they’ve been, not where they were born.”
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