Young Galaxy - "The Angels Are Surely Weeping (ft Hanna)".

Young Galaxy are changers. What do you do, after a wreck of a year? You lean your head against your lover's, one of you with closed eyes and the other wide open. You breathe. In the silence, you write lines about bringing an axe to the winter; you write about loss and going on. You go into a room and you sing songs into a machine.

It must be strange, to write such words, to murmur such verses, and then to send them across the sea. Yet Young Galaxy had lived their wreck of a year; they knew their hearts. They wanted not guitars' blaze, cresting drums - but space, curve, the indirect path. They had lost their taste for certainty. So they sent their night sketches, their sung questions, to a man they knew only as a dashed & flickering face, as a voice down the wire. Sweden's Dan Lissvik, one half of Studio, a producer who creates springs & summers but who cannot invent want. Young Galaxy sent him their want. They sent him their doubt and dream and steely need.

Over nine months, Lissvik made Shapeshifting out of their shapeshifting.

I say all this because "The Angels Are Surely Weeping" was made by men and women from Montreal and Gothenburg, by artists with fingers on keyboards and folded corners in books, who raise fur-lined hoods to go out into the snow. But it sounds like bending, seeking jetplumes; it sounds like a coral reef. This song is neon and radiant, lithe, volatile. If I were feeling cheeky I would tell the story of a great aquatic civilization, thousands of years hence, whales with slow & giant hearts, jeweled headdresses, with pearly lanterns, and the way they would hear this song, sing in time, mournful. Yes, I'd go on a long riff about whales. But I am not feeling cheeky. I hear this song's meditations and I think of tomorrow, and yesterday; the way the light changes, inside our chests, as easily as a dance-step.

[buy / available right now on iTunes / previously / stream Shapeshifting in full]

Sinbad Richardson's delicious music-video for another new YG song, "We Have Everything":

(photo source)