Dutch Uncles Announce New Album 'Big Balloon', Stream Title Track

Manchester based indie rock/art pop band Dutch Uncles have announced they will release their fifth studio album titled 'Big Balloon' on 17 February.

The record has taken inspiration from Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes, Low-era David Bowie, Eastern European techno and their own dads’ record collections. Thematically, it’s set to deal with everything from austerity, paranoia and loneliness to fried chicken.

Vocalist and lyricist Duncan Wallis: “The song has a simple message: to be content with who you are. If you need help with that, then don’t be ashamed or frustrated. If other people appear to be doing a better job at being you than you then it means that that’s not you. And that’s okay too.” “As soon as recording began, it felt like the perfect response to the feelings of abandonment we’d been harbouring recently. We see it as the perfect distillation of everything we set out to achieve on the new record.”

Composer and bass player Robin Richards:“The song helped steer the direction of the songs written afterwards which became the album Big Balloon. It reminded us of the potency of the electric guitar, and brought them back as focal instruments on the record.”

Pre-order the album here, check out the tracklist, and have a listen to title track below.

Tracklist:
01. Big Balloon
02. Baskin’
03. Combo Box
04. Same Plane Dream
05. Achameleon
06. Hiccup
07. Streetlight
08. Oh Yeah
09. Sink
10. Overton

(facebook.com/dutchuncles)

Novella Announce New Album 'Change of State', Air Title Track

London-based dream pop band Novella have announced they will be releasing their new album titled 'Change of State' in February 17 via Sinderlyn Records.

The follow-up to last year's debut album 'Land' was recorded over the period of a few months in the Victorian bedroom studio of James Hoare (Ultimate Painting, Veronica Falls) on an old 1960’s 8-track, this set up forced Novella to utilize an economy of sound on Change of State.

Over the course of ten tracks, Novella take the time and space necessary to let the physical and ideological implications behind a changing state run rampant through themes that linger as much in topical discussion as they do in perennial reflections of human experience.

They discovered that there’s beauty in simplicity and restriction as nothing could be gratuitously added or subtracted with the click of a mouse. It lent, what the band call a little Joe Meek magic to the process, and what could have been an added pressure instead gave way to instinct: “The best songs we wrote were written towards the end of the sessions, when we had too little time to think too much about them”.

Pre-order the record here, check out the tracklist and listen to the title track below:

Tracklisting
01. Does The Island Know
02. Change Of State
03. Desert
04. Elements
05. A Thousand Feet
06. Thun
07. Come In
08. Four Colours
09. Side By Side
10. Seize The Sun

(Facebook)