Stockholm, Sweden’s newest dynamic duo, We Are
Serenades (formerly Serenades), are set to release their debut album, Criminal Heaven,
on Cherrytree Records/Interscope on April 17th. We Are Serenades are the musical pairing of Adam
Olenius (Shout Out Louds) and Markus Krunegard (Laakso), two of
Sweden’s most highly-regarded songwriters. Singing together at all times to create a seamless, singular
“third voice,” We Are Serenades create effortlessly stunning, indie pop bliss. Watch
the video for the album’s brilliant first single, “Birds."
The story of We Are Serenades reads a bit like a love
affair. A chance meeting between two charismatic leaders of two traveling packs of musicians,
stealing glances on the sly at a truck stop somewhere along the Autobahn. A short and
shy conversation, sweetly cramped by mutual admiration, and the first ice was broken.
Back home in Stockholm, frequent run-in’s, in clubs and in bars, caused the duo to
finally become friends, eventually deciding to play music together.
Songwriting happened within a pre-agreed-upon structure. “We
set something like a dogma to follow,” is how the band explains it. “We focused on
repetitiveness, both of us singing at the same time, a bombastic, walkable beat.” Songs grew
from there, all constructed according to the gospel of Markus and Adam. The resulting
album is one of the damn finest collections of sweet pop exuberance you’ll hear in
2012.
Woozy, bleached out, and dizzyingly fresh, Criminal
Heaven opens with “All the Words,” full of perfect, 8-bit video game keyboard blips meshing
with washes of sound and tales of late night drunken texts. “Birds” is the band’s calling card, based around a
smooth, sexy, string part, while previously released single “Oceans” has a quality of sonic submersion matched with one of the sunniest choruses on the album.
Title track “Criminal Heaven” replaces the band’s dreamy haze with a simple acoustic
guitar, showcasing their brilliant
songwriting at its most elemental, while closing track
“Walking Home” stacks sky-high harmonies against a genius sax solo.
We Are Serenades will be coming Stateside to
play a full U.S. tour this May, but first, they’ll be making a stop at this year’s SXSW. Dates/venues
to be announced soon!
More on We Are Serenades:
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