Azar Swan Share New Single "Territorial" with NPR Music; New Album Savage Exile due December 1 via Aufnahme + Wiedergabe
Azar Swan Share New Single "Territorial" with NPR MusicNew Album Savage Exile due December 1 via aufnahme + wiedergabe
photo credit: Angele-Leigh Breaux
“Prime industrial pop.” - Pitchfork
"If 2014's And Blow Us A Kiss sounded like Azar Swan's industrial take on Robyn's desperate and bright electro-pop, then Savage Exile is primed to be a caliginous chasm coiled in righteous noise." -NPR Music
“It's a totally heady and brilliantly catchy Gothic world music…There's nothing else out there that sounds like this, and if you're lucky to be in a place where it's warm right now this is going to resonate all the more.” - USA Today
“Azar Swan is a gypsy-punk-metal-industrial-pop-synth-rock band that – like its leading lady – defies a neat label.” - Bust
Stream: "Territorial" at NPR Music or SoundcloudAzar Swan have revealed their new single "Territorial" from their forthcoming release Savage Exile due December 1 via aufnahme + wiedergabe. "Territorial" premiered today at NPR Music and can also be shared at SoundCloud.About the song NPR Music's Lars Gotrich says: "You can feel the thud and clank of 'Territorial' unlike anything else in Azar Swan's catalog. That's due, in large part, to the duo trading in software for hardware instruments. 'The goddamn sun is a golden knife,' the duo sings. 'The goddamn sun is a dead bird smeared across the sky in violent light.' It's an arresting image seared into gossamer synths that almost choke the atmosphere. If 2014's And Blow Us A Kiss sounded like Azar Swan's industrial take on Robyn's desperate and bright electro-pop, then Savage Exile is primed to be a caliginous chasm coiled in righteous noise." Savage Exile is available to pre-order on limited edition vinyl at the label's online store and digitally at Bandcamp. Azar Swan has also announced a Brooklyn album release show coming on November 30 at Elsewhere. Advance tickets for the show are available HERE.
Azar Swan began in 2012 when the core members of Religious to Damn, Zohra Atash and Joshua Strawn, chose to reframe their collaboration. Religious to Damn relished in the strange results of collaborating with multiple, often virtuoso musicians to produce deceptively straightforward dream pop. Members of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, His Name is Alive and Time of Orchids made appearances alongside Tamaryn, and future members of Tombs and Pop. 1280 to create what The Village Voice called, “a mix of desert strum, hypnotic pulse, spirited-away synths, Lynchian weirdness, and Fleetwood Maximalism.” Azar Swan opted for a similarly eclectic collision, this time pared down to just Atash and Strawn, embracing their lifelong love of electronic music.
Azar Swan’s first two albums, 2013’s Dance Before The War and 2014’s And Blow Us a Kiss were exercises in finding out what might happen when hip hop’s increasingly industrial use of heavy drum samples and distorted synthesizers met with grandiose melodic tribalism and the get-up-and-dance of freestyle. But whereas experimental artists often belatedly decide to delve into “pop,” Azar Swan’s trajectory has gone in reverse, resembling artists like Talk Talk for which the pop records are a prelude to increasingly strange compositions and uncomfortably raw emotions. Atash says the forthcoming album Savage Exile “is a beautiful purging of anger.”
Savage Exile is as much of a reflection of the band’s personal experiences as their professional ones. On the professional side, as the band was finishing Dance Before the War, Strawn was releasing the first Vaura LP and Atash was touring with A Storm of Light performing parts that Jarboe had originally recorded. A remix by Coil’s Drew McDowall led to his appearance on the song “Mouth of the Sky.” Bookings alongside Cut Hands (former Whitehouse provocateur William Bennett) and Prurient were followed by 2015’s remix collaboration Variations featuring intense re-imaginings of “We Hunger” by Vatican Shadow and “For Last And Forever” by Cut Hands.
photo credit: Angele-Leigh Breaux“Prime industrial pop.” - Pitchfork
"If 2014's And Blow Us A Kiss sounded like Azar Swan's industrial take on Robyn's desperate and bright electro-pop, then Savage Exile is primed to be a caliginous chasm coiled in righteous noise." -NPR Music
“It's a totally heady and brilliantly catchy Gothic world music…There's nothing else out there that sounds like this, and if you're lucky to be in a place where it's warm right now this is going to resonate all the more.” - USA Today
“Azar Swan is a gypsy-punk-metal-industrial-pop-synth-rock band that – like its leading lady – defies a neat label.” - Bust
Stream: "Territorial" at NPR Music or SoundcloudAzar Swan have revealed their new single "Territorial" from their forthcoming release Savage Exile due December 1 via aufnahme + wiedergabe. "Territorial" premiered today at NPR Music and can also be shared at SoundCloud.About the song NPR Music's Lars Gotrich says: "You can feel the thud and clank of 'Territorial' unlike anything else in Azar Swan's catalog. That's due, in large part, to the duo trading in software for hardware instruments. 'The goddamn sun is a golden knife,' the duo sings. 'The goddamn sun is a dead bird smeared across the sky in violent light.' It's an arresting image seared into gossamer synths that almost choke the atmosphere. If 2014's And Blow Us A Kiss sounded like Azar Swan's industrial take on Robyn's desperate and bright electro-pop, then Savage Exile is primed to be a caliginous chasm coiled in righteous noise." Savage Exile is available to pre-order on limited edition vinyl at the label's online store and digitally at Bandcamp. Azar Swan has also announced a Brooklyn album release show coming on November 30 at Elsewhere. Advance tickets for the show are available HERE.
Azar Swan began in 2012 when the core members of Religious to Damn, Zohra Atash and Joshua Strawn, chose to reframe their collaboration. Religious to Damn relished in the strange results of collaborating with multiple, often virtuoso musicians to produce deceptively straightforward dream pop. Members of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, His Name is Alive and Time of Orchids made appearances alongside Tamaryn, and future members of Tombs and Pop. 1280 to create what The Village Voice called, “a mix of desert strum, hypnotic pulse, spirited-away synths, Lynchian weirdness, and Fleetwood Maximalism.” Azar Swan opted for a similarly eclectic collision, this time pared down to just Atash and Strawn, embracing their lifelong love of electronic music.
Azar Swan’s first two albums, 2013’s Dance Before The War and 2014’s And Blow Us a Kiss were exercises in finding out what might happen when hip hop’s increasingly industrial use of heavy drum samples and distorted synthesizers met with grandiose melodic tribalism and the get-up-and-dance of freestyle. But whereas experimental artists often belatedly decide to delve into “pop,” Azar Swan’s trajectory has gone in reverse, resembling artists like Talk Talk for which the pop records are a prelude to increasingly strange compositions and uncomfortably raw emotions. Atash says the forthcoming album Savage Exile “is a beautiful purging of anger.”
Savage Exile is as much of a reflection of the band’s personal experiences as their professional ones. On the professional side, as the band was finishing Dance Before the War, Strawn was releasing the first Vaura LP and Atash was touring with A Storm of Light performing parts that Jarboe had originally recorded. A remix by Coil’s Drew McDowall led to his appearance on the song “Mouth of the Sky.” Bookings alongside Cut Hands (former Whitehouse provocateur William Bennett) and Prurient were followed by 2015’s remix collaboration Variations featuring intense re-imaginings of “We Hunger” by Vatican Shadow and “For Last And Forever” by Cut Hands.
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