Danish post-punk/dream-pop band Violence has toiled for the last three years, but now they are ready to harvest the fruits of their labour at last with the first single from their upcoming album, Area Sub Rosa.
The dreamy track is called “Rendezvous (Not I/We)”. The sound is inspired by the Disintegration era of The Cure, as well as other more modern acts such as Cold Cave, Wild Nothing, and Soft Kill. The heartfelt, earnest track, with rolling percussion and ringing guitars, is a fine piece of songcraft – the melancholy permeates the song, but there is a sense of optimism driving the emotions forward. Rendezvous tells the story of two individuals finding and losing each other in the blink of an eye. “Romeo and Juliet…set in the ‘80s…and none of them died. But one of them wrote a song,” says the band.
“Rendezvous” ended up serving as the creative path to the rest of the band’s music as a whole. The track is a bass-driven song, with a potent combination of guitar and vocals creating a lush dreamscape on top of a tight rhythm composition.
“Picture a crack or a void in the concrete you step into, and can’t escape from,” says lead singer and writer Christoffer Sylvest. “It’s inescapable misery. This album inhales the emotional qualities of life; all its entanglements, and gives the listeners an opportunity to come to their own understanding, in about the same way we did.”
Violence, which hails from Copenhagen, forges a sonic terrain of melancholic, transcendent tones. The major-scale tones and airtight production by Chris Kreutzfeldt (Møl/Cabal/Siamese) create associations to pompous stadium rock like The 1975 and Bring Me The Horizon. Violence also gleefully adds a dash of wildness and carelessness often found in the punk genre. It’s no surprise to longtime fans: the members were once known as the hardcore punk band WOES.
Watch the beautifully edited performance video below:
Area Sub Rosa will be released on the 22nd of October 2021 through Last Mile Records.
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