Black Doldrums share new video for 'Dreamcatcher'. Debut album out now via Fuzz Club Records. Touring UK in April & June in support of the album.
Arriving ahead of April and June UK tour dates in support of the band’s newly-released debut album ‘Dead Awake’, London-based psych/shoegaze duo are now sharing a new video for ‘Dreamcatcher’. Out now on Fuzz Club Records, the track is lifted from the band’s new ‘Dead Awake’ LP produced by Jared Artaud (The Vacant Lots, Alan Vega) and following two sold-out EPs (most recently 2019’s ‘She Divine’) and tour dates around the UK, EU and US. You can stream ‘Dreamcatcher’ and the ‘Dead Awake’ album below.
With lyrics like ‘I won’t follow where a fool drowns, I’ll see it through until the day I die’, the band say that the moody psychedelic post-punk of ‘Dreamcatcher’ is a song “about defiance against a sense of being held down, an idea which occurs constantly throughout the album.” The single’s new video is the third in a trilogy by film-maker Laura Conlon that also includes lead singles ‘Sad Paradise’ and ‘Into Blue’.
Originally a duo founded by Sophie Landers (drums) and Kevin Gibbard (guitar/vocals) but now recently fleshed out to a trio with Matt Holt joining on bass, Black Doldrums deal in a dark, shoegazing psych that melds gothic post-punk with a leather-clad rock’n’roll spirit. Having cultivated a die-hard following in the UK psych underground, Kevin and Sophie set to work on their long-awaited debut album in 2020. Their original plans were to travel to New York to record the album with Jared Artaud of fellow label-mates The Vacant Lots however the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns and travel restrictions inevitably put a stop to that. Instead, they recorded the album in London with Artaud producing and mixing the album remotely from Brooklyn.
“It made for an interesting collaboration as the distance could have been an obstacle”, Sophie recalls, “but it actually helped creativity as we were more inclined to stay in touch and have really decent phone calls at length discussing the songs in a lot of detail. We really enjoyed those conversations with Jared about music and all of our influences. I think you can hear on the record that it is a full collaboration.” The more collaborative effort of ‘Dead Awake’ finds Black Doldrums switching gears and adopting a cleaner, more precise creative approach than that of their earlier material.
“The idea was to be absolutely brutal with our songs and cut them down to what we only felt was necessary”, Sophie remembers: “Up until this point we had been experimenting and were happy with what we had created but we no longer felt the need to hide behind too much reverb and an excessive amount of guitars. It still sounds like us but it has all the elements needed to stand the test of time.” The result is an album that feels colder and more stripped back – the effects are still there but stripped down to their fundamentals so that the songs themselves take precedence over any wall-of-sound deliria.
DEAD AWAKE TOUR-DATES
22/4 Manchester Night and Day Cafe
23/04 Huddersfield Venn Street Social
24/4 Leeds Oporto
26/4 Leicester Firebug
28/4 Hull The New Adelphi Club
29/4 Todmorden Golden Lion Todmorden
30/4 Liverpool Smithdown Road Festival - Black Cat Stage
1/5 Glasgow Stag and Dagger venue TBC
8/6 Nottingham The Bodega, Nottingham
8/6 Winchester The railway inn
10/6 Exeter Exeter Cavern
11/6 Penzance TheAcorn Penzance
15/6London The Grace
16/6 St Albans The Horn - St Albans
17/6 Northampton The Black Prince
18/6 Bedford Bedford Esquires
30/6 London 229 (supporting The Primitives)
