If Heartbreak Satellite weren’t familiar to you at the start of the year, if you’ve been following our site they certainly will be now. The Norwegian trio (Ragnhild Jamtveit, Tobias Pfeil and Håkon Brunborg) have been all over these web pages this year, from an interview at By:Larm to a premiere for their single Bugs. And we’re not stopping anytime soon (we might never stop, who really knows?), because today we’ve got the first listen of their debut album Foxy.
So what does Foxy sound like? Well, if you’re familiar with the band’s earlier work, this will probably meet your expectations and then knock them flat out. Foxy a bit like putting together an art-pop pinata and then cracking it open to see what falls out. There’s a bit of everything – bouncing, rubbery synth lines, gooey, sticky melodies, acoustic softness, a song called Heart Of A Bike, is that a fucking saxophone? Basically, so much going on that trying to describe it in under 10,000 words is an impossible task. But they, it’s an adventure, and Heartbreak Satellite make it an entertaining, weird and charming one. The band say:
Prior to making Foxy, Heartbreak Satellite had played a few acoustic gigs here and there in Norway mostly. In December 2016 we decided to record an album – without really talking much about what it should be or how it should sound, we planned to record for 10 days straight in Tobi’s small rehearsal studio in Copenhagen. We all brought a couple of synths, some microphones and a drum machine. All of the songs were written in those 10 days, just toying around with what we had in the studio. We later met up in Trondheim and Oslo to finish writing lyrics and to add vocal and synth tracks. Upon finishing the album after about half a year of recording and editing, Simen Hallset (Gold Celeste) mixed the whole thing in a few days, further defining the recorded band sound.A lot of the songs on the album capture the inner and outer turmoil that all of us were experiencing in our personal lives at that particular time. Many of the themes and lyrics are about surreal relationships and encounters, as are some of the song forms. We were experimenting with a sound that embrace chaotic, unpolished and immediate musical ideas. Working together in this uncritical and impulsive manner was a lot of fun. Ragnhild’s brother, Olav Fangel Jamtveit drew the album cover. We’re all pretty obsessed with animals and animal documentaries, and animals with human personalities are a reoccurring element in our lyrical and visual universe. We’re already working on our next album, which is probably going to be even more subtle and sensitive, continuing in a similar vein as Foxy but more refined and detailed. We’ll probably release our first songs from that album in 2019.