Golden Hours share new single 'Dead On', self-titled debut album out March 31 on Fuzz Club
Golden Hours have released their latest single ‘Dead On’, the second to be lifted from their self-titled debut album out March 31st on Fuzz Club. Based between Berlin and Brussels, the project is comprised of past and present members of Gang Of Four, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Tricky, The Fuzztones, The Third Sound and Fifty Foot Combo, to name just a few. A band with mileage and stories, Golden Hours trade in rock’n’roll missives that are at times dark, tense and hypnotic, at others sweaty, relentless and danceable. Stream the single below and pre-order the LP here.
Follow last month’s debut single ‘Come And Find Me’, the brooding ‘Dead On’ single is a piece of dark and cinematic gothic post-punk. Wim Janssens (Bass, Keys, Vocals) says of the track: “This song creeps up on you like a shadow in your hiding place. Piano chords drift on a dark pulsating bass, drums pound like there’s something going down but you can’t exactly see what until it hits you like only truth can, dead on. Guitars keep coming back to the same chord, like waves of fuzz carrying slight melodic movement, turning and burning a sonic hole in your mind. It’s ‘requiem for a dream’ at low speed, forever there like Saturn’s rings.”
Joined by Hákon Adalsteinsson (Guitar/Vocals), Rodrigo Fuentealba Palavacino (Guitar) and Tobias Humble (Drums/Vocals), Wim says of the Golden Hours project and its incoming debut: “The musical backgrounds of each member are pretty broad but somehow when we come together there’s a pretty clear definition of what our music should sound like. There’s a beautiful friction between the noise we produce and the love for melody that seems to overtake at just the right moment. There never seems to be a lack of ideas when we come together. In silent agreement, every idea gets tried and will be further developed into a song or skipped in a heartbeat. No time is wasted. It all happens pretty automatically.”
Golden Hours came to exist after a chance encounter in 2021 between Tobias and Rodrigo whilst they were both in Athens, Greece playing the same clubs and festivals that week – Rodrigo with The Fuzztones, Tobias with Gang Of Four. Tobias recalls: “Rodrigo and I met first in the back of a van, careering into Athens, the two of us hungover and sweating, distracting ourselves from the perilous journey by barking names of EBM and post-punk influences at each other as our fellow passengers did their best efforts to keep the driver from turning our ride into a Greek tragedy for the ages.” By the time the shuttle bus had pulled into their hotel to the tune of screeching tires and relieved passengers, the Golden Hours were formed.
With plans now in motion, Rodrigo tasked himself with rounding up some co-conspirators to complete the Golden Hours line-up: “We planned to meet up in Berlin where I had made contact with Hàkon, being a fan of his work with The Third Sound and Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Wim, who I knew from Brussels and his work with Joy Wellboy and Tricky. In Berlin we had three loud rehearsals, working on loose material, occasionally interrupted for a silent smoke and a drink and some grinning.” A studio was then booked and over two days five songs were recorded in clandestine fashion in a secret location in Berlin – the band adjusting their dynamics to avoid the keen eyes of the Polizei roaming the streets outside.
Later that year Rodrigo was invited to be the artist-in-residence at the Ghent edition of Desertfest, so he invited the band along to make their live debut at the festival and spend five days holed up in the Vooruit venue writing and rehearsing. Returning to Berlin, the rest of the album was then committed to tape over another two-day recording session, with Wim helming the mixing duties. “Wim is the bands' sonic alchemist,” Tobias says, “he toiled for what felt like aeons, melding the unshakeable, and often conflicting, band-members’ desires into a complete being of the like that would make a Shelley shudder.” And, like that, their self-titled debut was complete. Singing immediately to Fuzz Club, ‘Golden Hours’ will be released into the world in March 2023.
