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CMU Approved
Approved: No Swoon
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 5 November 2019
A little over a year on from their debut EP – ‘EP 1’ – No Swoon return with their first album, ‘No Swoon’.
The album is a constant battle between Tasha Abbott’s grinding shoegaze guitars, pulling everything towards a dark dystopia, and Zack Nestel-Patt’s more hopeful synths. Over the top of this, Abbot has a similar battle with herself in her lyrics – although she seems to side with the guitar more often than not.
“You know when you’re talking to someone about how fucked the world is – in many ways – right now and they say ‘but it’s better than it used to be, we’ve come so far!'” she says, explaining the inspiration for recent single ‘Forward’. “I hate that, ‘we’ve come so far’, it’s such a cop-out. Sure we’ve made progress, some things are better than before and some things aren’t”.
“That’s what this song, ‘Forward’ stems from”, she adds. “That cop-out of an idea that things are better and great. Are the clouds really breaking, or merely moving over? Meaning are we really making progress or is whatever problem just shifting, either to someone else, or in a different form”.
Abbot’s creative mind is represented visually in the video for album opener ‘Don’t Wake Up, Wake Up’, of which she says: “[It] follows two people searching for and finding themselves lost, slipping between a dream and reality. This song started from a dream of mine. Usually my dreams are very darkly lit or at night with muted colours, except there is always one or two objects that are highly saturated in a brighter colour”.
If you happen to be in New York tomorrow, you can catch the duo playing an album launch show at Union Pool in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, you can watch the video for ‘Don’t Wake Up, Wake Up’ here:
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