Feeling more than excited for tonight’s exclusive video premiere on Last Day Deaf by the Swiss artist Alice Torrent with the 3rd single ‘Seal Skin‘ taken from the recently released, 2nd album ‘An Ode to your Sun‘. Post-metal and shoegaze are genuiney balanced in this majestic slow-burner, while the mesmerizing vocals concurrently. sound vulnerable, eerie and authoritative. Just imagine an atypical marriage between 90s-era Slowdive with Zola Jesus, and you may get a clue….

Prepare yourselves for shivers down the spine and make sure you check the visualizer beautifully crafted with footage from her recording session in Iceland, with Images by David Glassey, and the editing and rendering by Tom Loretan.

Press Notes:

Alice Torrent returns with “An Ode to your Sun”, a second record oscillating between the sobriety of the piano/voice and the grandeur of indie-pop sometimes flirting with post-metal ambiances. Twelve tracks with pure firepower, distilling their share of soaring atmospheres worthy of the Icelandic nature where the record was written. Her debut album “Phantom Limb” (2016) revealed Alice Torrent’s visceral passion for music. From a very young age, she’d been writing songs, composing music, again and again, alone or with friends, deeply fascinated by sound layers. This first outing would lead her to fully live from her passion as shows and commissions came one after another, composing for theater and contemporary circus. Today, she gets back to some studio work and presents her second album, “An Ode to your Sun”.

It all started in a simple and ideal way: composed and arranged during an idyllic winter residence in Icelandic nature, “An Ode to your Sun” smells the pastel colors of the Nordic island and its blizzard (captured along other field recordings on “Crow”). The titles were then brought back to Switzerland to be reworked and recorded with musicians who had become friends over the years. But the conception of the album was to be turned upside down by a few surprises: a long illness leaving Alice Torrent the possibility to only work on the album during rare high-times, the pandemic, and, on a much happier note, a pregnancy (during which the voices were all recorded). Voices landing on texts written by her husband, David Glassey (also a founding member of the band Herod), after Alice Torrent gave him a general direction: she thus makes a nod to mythology Nordic (“Seal Skin” and its reference to the seal woman, eternally torn between land and ocean) than a farewell to a friend gone suddenly on the very refined closing title, “Cherif”.

The conception of “An Ode to your Sun” has therefore oscillated between extreme difficulties and happiness, and manages to translate this emotional roller coaster through songs full of power, whether delicate on the piano (“À l’Automne”, “An Ode to your Sun”, “In Front Of You”, “Window”) or tinged with riffs flirting with post-metal (“The Beckoning Silence”, “Standstill”).

This power, “An Ode to your Sun” also required it in terms of sound processing, and the mixing job of Johann Meyer, the sound engineer of the French metal giants Gojira, serves the pieces wonderfully. The album then went to Ted Jensen (The Who, Metallica, Deftones, etc.) in Nashville, Tennessee, for mastering.