With its shadowy dream pop sound and themes of “love, loss, and self-discovery,” Leoblu‘s new EP Blu Lucid Nightmare feels like the culmination of Julia Carlsson’s project to date. Hailing from Åland and based in Berlin, Leoblu has made a name with ambiguous and atmospheric music which situates intimate emotion against the more mysterious forces at work around us. And the new EP delves deeper than ever before. “Recording and producing all the songs on this EP has been an incredibly personal journey for me,” as Carlsson explains. “Each track represents a different facet of my experiences and emotions, and I’m excited to share this part of myself with the world.”
Focusing on nature’s ephemerality, first single ‘full moon & snow boots’ saw Leoblu set “personal emotions against larger, almost mystical backdrops,” as we wrote in a preview, “as though the natural world was our own longing manifest,” while ‘it’s just a coffee’ homes in on a more specific yearning. An attempt to navigate the post-break up emotional terrain where the wish to return to what has been lost exists in tension with the desire to move on.
‘Backlash’ follows as a kind of answer to its predecessor, an attempt to break free of the liminal present painted in all of its visceral struggle, before closer ‘vem kan segla förutan vind?’ transcends the entire experience with a powerful (re)connection to history. The first Leoblu song to be recorded in Swedish, the track is a reimagining of a traditional folk song from Carlsson’s home of Åland. A means of reaching beyond the conflict of the present, back through Carlsson’s childhood and beyond, tapping into histories of place and landscape and emerging with a newfound comfort within the perpetual cycles of love and loss.
Blu Lucid Nightmare is out now and available from the usual places.
