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The UK-based darkwave/post-punk duo Hanging Freud has released today their most personal and emotive full-length ever, Worship, via Belgian label Spleen+ (a division of Alfa Matrix). On this seventh studio album, Paula Borges and Jonathan Skinner continue refining their unique sound identity that nobody managed so far to narrow down to one specific music style, often evoking influences and elements of post-punk, ethereal, synthgaze, cold wave, ambient pop or yet experimental electronica.
With the heartbeat of a drum machine as a metronome, Paula’s vocals are dark, haunting, almost glacial, her enunciation is both plaintive and full of echoing fragile grace. While the cinematic music warps them all in a melancholic ethereal cocoon made of mechanical funeral melodies, icy minimal sequences and suffocating synth atmospheres. The overall ambience is dense, lingering, almost claustrophobic, but so poignant and uplifting that it takes you by the throat and touches you at the deepest end of your soul.
The ten songs featured on this album literally come from a place of contradiction hanging somewhere between courageous vulnerability and fearful resilience and dealing with themes such as collective distress and loss, finding beauty in tragedy or yet questioning about what makes us human in the symbolic contrasts of life and death. It’s no surprise to hear that this “less is more” introspective ode to melancholia was written in particular claustrophobic circumstances during the pandemic lockdown.
Paula Borges comments: “Because of what was going on, we were essentially stuck in temporary accommodation in Scotland, away from our studio and forced into a period unexperienced before. The songs that came out therefore come from a different place. Everything was done within a laptop and is proudly 100% digital. It was recorded and mixed while literally sitting on the side of a bed in a mouse infested apartment.”
If you missed Hanging Freud so far, the moment has come to fall under their freezing spell and addictively hit the play button again and again. Listen to the entire new album, Worship, right here, right below. Link
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