With a new album set for release sometime in the new year, Kraków Loves Adana have returned with Nothing’s Set In Stone, a new EP which released last week as something of a surprise. The record is comprised of three tracks and corresponding instrumental versions which are part of a slew of new material that will also form the band’s next full-length, due for release sometime next year. When chronic pain forced Çiçek into a six month hiatus in playing guitar, she turned attention to previous recordings that hadn’t quite made the cut for albums, cherry picking three to form the new EP.

But this isn’t a random assortment of b-sides. All three songs share both a common lineage and overall atmosphere. Written on acoustic guitar, they hark back to Çiçek’s earliest forays into creating music, swapping out some of the unsettling electronic elements in favour of stripped-back instrumentation and direct lyricism. “These three songs paint a picture of hopeful melancholia,” she describes, “and also remind me of my earlier work where there was just me and my guitar.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the opener and title track, which exists in a kind of insular hush, a listless lonely atmosphere full of quiet uncertainty that occasionally peaks in moments of emotional clarity. The song’s video, shot and edited by Çiçek herself, accentuates these feelings, consisting mainly of close-cropped shots of the singer gazing into space, lost in her thoughts. Check it out below:

Nothing’s Set in Stone is out now and available from the Kraków Loves Adana Bandcamp page.

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Kraków Loves Adana used this style to explore the gap between the human and the digital, from the loneliness of life among jpeg images and collected memories to the failure of the internet to fulfil its promise of utopian democracy. Deniz Çiçek and Robert Heitmann have released another album in the meantime, though again they channelled their distinctive sound into explorations of contemporary living. A space in which the boundaries between physical reality, virtual reality and dreams began to merge and blur.

This autumn sees Kraków Loves Adana return with a brand new record, Follow the Voice, and the lead singles suggest a further dive into such themes. Take the title track, a stark and shimmered song that walks a line between cold and heartfelt. The sound is as dramatic as ever, at times almost sinister in its tone, but Çiçek’s vocals harness the track’s rhythm to emerge above this. A human voice searching for meaning amongst shadows and shining lights.

Haven’t seen you for ages
How are you
Still burning with the pages
But how are you
I fall asleep mid-sentence
At unexpected meetings
I’m a pale phantom of myself

The track comes complete with a video directed by the band themselves in collaboration with director of photography Philip Jestädt, and with additional art design by Hannes & Johannes.

Follow the Voice is out on the 12th November and you can pre-order it now from the Kraków Loves Adana Bandcamp page.

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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.”

‘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.

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.

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