Wednesday, February 1, 2012

We Are Serenades To Release Criminal Heaven April 17 On Cherrytree Records


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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