First of all I'm really happy I can take over this monthly selection of the upcoming PIAS albums as it's perfect to get in touch with the newest albums and also connect with bands and projects you don't know yet! So off to my personal selection! I'm too young to remember anything from THOMAS LEER & ROBERT RENTAL but from what I hear It's pretty good! MIDLAKE has a new album that sounds like recorded in the sixties with a clear psychedelic touch. But the album that caught me is for sure Placebo! I adore the sound mixed with the vocals and a layer of melancholy. It's the album of the month!
SOHNARR - album reissue ‘Coral Dusk - Reworked’ 04.03.22
In 05/2020 Patricia Vanneste released under the flagname Sohnarr her very first album: Coral Dusk. For that she travelled to the inner worlds of Sweden and Norway.where she composed and recorded the tracks. The past year Patricia invited 8 diverse artiests to rework each one track from the Coral Dusk album and used it as inspiration to rework them on her own.
31.03.2022 @ Handelsbeurs, Gent
NILÜFER YANYA: ‘Painless’ 04.03.22
PAINLESS is the follow-up to Nilüfer Yanya’s renowned 2019 debut album Miss Universe, which fully established her as a singular artist and a distinctive voice that simply has to be heard. The critically acclaimed Miss Universe - a widescreen concept record that took a tongue in cheek swipe at the most self-involved corners of the health and wellness industry - was followed last year by the three song EP Feeling Lucky?, which further explored Yanya’s fascination with ‘90s alt-rock melodies and drew on themes of resentment, her fear of flying, and the concept of luck. Pitchfork summed up Feeling Lucky? and her now peerless songwriting aptitude best: “Nilüfer Yanya’s melodies have a pull so strong they almost necessitate their own law of physics.” Yanya also re-released her early EPs on vinyl for the first time this year on the record Inside Out. The release is a fundraiser for Artists in Transit, a collaborative not for profit group she founded with her sister Molly that delivers art workshops to displaced people and communities in times of hardship.
30.03.2022 @ Botanique, Brussels
THOMAS LEER & ROBERT RENTAL: album reissue ‘The Bridge’ 11.03.22
The Grey Area of Mute have announced details of a long awaited reissue of Thomas Leer and Robert Rental’s influential 1979 album, The Bridge. The reissue of Leer and Rental’s sole collaboration will coincide with ‘From The Port To The Bridge’, an exhibition detailing the duo’s work and legacy, due to run at The Horse Hospital in London from 21 January through to 10 February 2022.
Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, both from Port Glasgow in Scotland, were at the vanguard of a DIY electronic scene that went on to influence and inform the 80s synth-pop movement. After self-releasing two solo 7” singles, they came to the attention of Throbbing Gristle and signed to their label, Industrial Records. Their one and only collaboration, The Bridge, was originally released in 1979, the first non-TG / associated release for the label.
MIDLAKE: ‘For The Sake Of The Bethel Woods’18.03.22
Loss and hope, isolation and communion, the cessation and renewal of purpose. Timeless and salient, these themes echo throughout the fifth album from Midlake, their first since Antiphon in 2013. Produced to layered, loving perfection by John Congleton, For the Sake of Bethel Woods is an album of immersive warmth and mystery from a band of ardent seekers, one of our generation’s finest: a band once feared lost themselves by fans, perhaps, but here revivified with freshness of intent.
02.04.2022 @ Trix, Antwerp
ROSCOE: ‘Folds’ 18.03.22
After six years of silence, Roscoe is back with a new album. So Far So Long is a luminous track, bringing a new color to the already wide palette of the band from Liège. It has the density that forged Roscoe's solid reputation on his first two albums, combined with syncopated beats and an unstoppable steel drum riff.
The single heralds FOLDS, the band's third album to be released in March 2022.
MATTIEL: ‘Georgia Gothic’ 18.03.22
Georgia Gothic, a magic third in Mattiel’s run of full-length albums, was shaped in the quiet seclusion of a woodland cabin in the north of the Atlanta duo’s mother-state; “Some faraway place that just Jonah and I could go where there would be no distractions, nothing else going on, and we could turn everything off and only focus on writing songs”, reflects Brown. Where 2017’s self-titled debut and its 2019 follow-up Satis Factory were written with what Swilley refers to as a “hands-off” approach — he arranging the music and Brown the lyrics and vocals, the two working largely separately — the making of Georgia Gothic was, for the first time, a truly collaborative undertaking.
19.05.2022 @ Trix, Antwerp
PLACEBO ‘Never Let Me Go’ 25.03.22
In September, Placebo resurfaced from a long hibernation to release their first single in five years – and first from the new album - Beautiful James. A joyous and celebratory song, it came quietly loaded with antagonism for the increasingly prominent, ignorant, factions that have come to litter modern conversation. As Brian Molko commented at the time, “If the song serves to irritate the squares and the uptight, so gleefully be it.”
As great masters in cataloguing the human condition, Placebo’s unique way of examining both its flaws and beauty finds fertile ground in 2021. Crawling out of the pandemic into a landscape of intolerance, division, tech-saturation and imminent eco-catastrophe, theirs is a voice that has rarely felt more significant to contemporary discourse, and more appropriate to sing these stories to the world. Within the magnetic slow-burn of new track ‘Surrounded By Spies’ no punches are pulled in confronting the erosion of civil liberties, as Brian Molko’s deft lyrical delivery is married to a creeping sense of claustrophobia that fittingly makes the walls feel as though they are closing in from all around.
25.06.2022 @ TW Classic Festival, Werchter
08.11.2022 @ Sportpaleis, Antwerp
