Like a lost 80s post-punk act, Double Echo return with ☾, their fifth full-length studio album, out now through Fabrika Records.
The album’s title is represented by a simple crescent moon symbol, glowing in the night sky on a retro art-designed sleeve, highlighting the iridescent pop, post-punk, and new wave contents therein.
The band, hailing from across two sides of the Atlantic via Liverpool and NYC, features Ash Lerczak, Chris Luna, and Ellon Souter. The trio infuses the album with brilliant dark pop elements that perfectly capture a mood lost in time, trapped in the amber of VHS and cassette tape.
This atmosphere is perfectly captured with the sorrowful “Sometimes We Are Strangers.” Here, the band tunes into an old-school darkwave frequency, like that of a college radio station 35 years ago, bringing an added goth-infused element to the album’s overall feel.
The video for the song sees a twitching protagonist who is himself, is tuned into that frequency, wandering a city absorbed in the music and the cathartic darkness of the morose-pop melody.
Watch the video “Sometimes We’re Strangers”, below:
Double Echo began in 2012 as a studio collaboration between producers Chris Luna (San Diego, California) Ash Lerczak (Liverpool, UK). They set out to re-mystify the forgotten practices of post-punk and primitive soundtrack electronica in the guise of a lost band from 1982 whose demo tape 4AD never got around to listening to. Their first release, the Black Morning EP, invited listeners to “dream of another world” of floating Casio keyboards and Sad Lovers And Giants guitars, demonstrating that their commitment to eighties authenticity went deeper than merely an aesthetic gimmick and found Double Echo a cult following on Bandcamp.
The following year in Liverpool – Double Echo played their first show as a live band. Determined not to go out as a “laptop act”, Chris and Ash performed alongside a dying, time-code striped tape machine and TR626, while smoke, weird projections, and an extremely loud amplifier created a suitably immersive atmosphere. The show convinced local label EDILS to release the Phantomime album on CD and cassette, which was shortly followed by a compilation of Double Echo’s online output by Ritual Tapes in the US.
A second album, La Danza, featuring new member Ellon Souter on lead vocals and a strong emphasis on cold synths, was released in 2015 on CD by Gothic Music (Finland) and on vinyl by Peter Out Records (Sweden) leading to their first European dates – a tour of darkwave clubs in Italy. Since then Double Echo retreated into their home studios to work on a series of follow-up albums (the first of which nears completion at the time of writing), pausing briefly in 2016 to self-release the Ancient Youth EP and to perform at Return To The Batcave Festival in Poland.
In early 2021, the band returned with two Double A-side singles, including “In the Gallery” / “Former”, and “The Bairn” / “Rendezvous”, heralding the release of their new album ‘☾’. Listen below.
Double Echo’s ‘☾’ is out now through Fabrika Records.
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