Separated by 750km, Sweden’s Old Amica have been developing their distinctive style since 2012 with help from the internet. Combining folk, ambient and classical styles with a morose slowcore sensibility, their songs are lush and transportive, managing to sound at once wide open and intimate. As we described of 2014 album Fabula, Old Amica’s “heartfelt music” adopts the “fundamentals of folk and sends them spinning through a filter of shimmering electronics,” a sound that might be otherworldly, but undeniably human.
Released with our friends at Fox Food Records, Constellation is a brand new full-length album from Old Amica, and one which builds upon the foundations of previous releases to “try to discern hope in the vulgar present.” The songs first started taking shape in the early months of 2016, though the record was only half finished when life intervened. “Sounds became muffled,” they describe. “The music suddenly stopped and the timbre died.”
For a whole year Old Amica produced nothing, but a commission to score a short film helped shake off the paralysis. With the soundtrack complete (an album in its own right, Taiga, out now via Whitelabrecs), they turned to Constellation once more. The inspiration and motivation had returned, and they finally finished what they had started.
Today we have the honour of sharing three singles in preparation for the release, tracks that show the emotional intensity of an album dedicated to a diversity of sounds. With a post-rock sense of drama and modulated vocals, ‘Julia, Umeå’ leans as far into the electronic genre as we’ve seen from the band, a dance beat emerging through ghostly harmonies and swirling instrumentation. There’s a haunted sense to the song, ghosts metaphysical or digital or both, though the melancholy fires a cathartic sense of motion and purpose that leads to an affirming conclusion—living up to the hopeful mission statement that inspired the record at its inception.
However, the band themselves admit that finding hope in the vulgar present is difficult, and sometimes the intention fails. Fittingly then, even the most hopeful songs are balanced with a sadness or reflection, Old Amica unwilling or unable to let go of darkness completely. As we described in a preview when the track was released as a single back in 2017, ‘Condensation’ is “a great example of what Old Amica do best, lush layered electronics gild gentle vocals and a steady pulsing drum beat.” The tone is undeniably pensive, “but isn’t necessarily a totally sad song, a point highlighted by its warm, fuzzy undertones.”
Because the hope in the music of Old Amica is hard-won, worked for, the delicate, transient result of engaging with the world without cynicism. Based around an stripped back guitar line and situated much more closely to the folk pole of the spectrum, ‘Juli, Göteborg’ is another case in point. Looking for hope does not mean that we will find it, and finding it does not mean we will hold onto it, but there is something in the act of looking that lifts a weight all the same.
Artwork by Björn Kleinhenz