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Artist News Gigs & Festivals Releases
The Joy Formidable bear new album
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 27 June 2018
The Joy Formidable have announced that they will release their new album, ‘Aaarth’, in the autumn. Along with this news, they’ve also released new single ‘The Wrong Side’.
“With life not always being that kind, you can either go down a really dark hole or you can smear yourself with colour and reverie and try to forget”, says vocalist and guitarist Ritzy Bryan. “That’s what we did with ‘Aaarth’; we threw ourselves into this beautiful vivacious collage of experimentation, real meets unreal, and stopped giving a fuck about things that didn’t matter, and started caring more about the things that are worth your time”.
She continues: “‘Aaarth’ marks a transformative, near-psychedelic rebirth that channels long-held anger, soundtracking a chaotic global period of injustice and division, setting it against a deeply poignant backdrop of personal experiences and healing. Although the album came into being as the band travelled the globe and recorded in their mobile recording studio, the music intertwines the whispering hills of Wales with the otherworldly rainbow canyons of the Utah/Arizona border.
“We’ve definitely made a colourful, mystical collage with this record, partly because of our surroundings”, she adds. “Those multi-coloured sunsets and the primaeval elements of nature in the Southwest – it’s emboldened our imaginations in the songwriting and the production”.
“I love stories and seeing symbolism and meaning change with different cultures and interpretations” she goes on. “I see it in my lyrics, a lot of the imagery plays on being ambivalent because I’m often expressing a lot of things at once. That’s true of the title; it falls somewhere between a scream, an exaltation, a play on words, and then this motif of the bear – ‘arth’ in Welsh – that spiritually represents strength, wisdom and healing”.
The album will be out on 28 Sep, and the band will play a handful of UK shows in August before heading off to support Foo Fighters in the US in September.
Listen to ‘The Wrong Side’ here:
