We wrote about Kraków Loves Adana back in February, where we described their “slightly weird and fully nostalgic brand of pop music,” when covering the single, ‘Rapture’. “The sound here is one of ominous romance,” we continued, “as though working emotions loose from the past, exploring the strange spaces and film-grain footage of sun-bleached tapes, their contents at once dark and neon-lit, love and heartbreak entwined into cinematic spectacle.”
The song is the lead track from Songs After The Blue, the fourth studio album from Hamburg duo Deniz Çiçek and Robert Heitmann, and it’s clear that the entire record is crafted from the same aesthetic. Drawing inspiration from a wide range of artistic sources, from Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet and Patti Smith’s Just Kids to movies such as Heathers and Breakfast Club, the album spins new wave, electro-pop and indie rock into a beguiling blend of familiar and strange.
The thematic side of the album is equally fluid, with lyrics that manage to sound at once intimate and abstract, a collision of the human and digital where connection does not necessarily equate true communication. Indeed, such a tension informs much of the release, the struggle of living and loving in a world of images and information. Songs such as ‘Heather’ tussle with some sort of loss of tangible existence in a world augmented by technology, where direct experience is replaced by the curation and re-visitation of the past. “We used to sleep under the trees,” Çiçek sings, “Now all we do is browse through / Long forgotten distant memories,” and later decrying “Living in a mirror / feeling like an error.”
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‘Resonating Truly’ expands upon similar ideas, opening with the idea of “living [i]n a made-up scenery” before detailing a kind of free-fall through too many memories, too much information. ‘The Day the Internet Died’ feels like a culmination of these themes. As the press release describes, the track explores the “discrepancy between the promises of a virtual community and the lack of intimacy and internal isolation in the real world.” Worse, this does not result in a deadening of feeling, like the cliche of screen-obsessed zombies, but rather lonely and desperate people doing all they can to break free, to cut through the technological haze to once again feel something.
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Songs After The Blue is out now via Better Call Rob and you can buy in on vinyl and cassette via the Kraków Loves Adana Bandcamp page.
