‘Stunning… Endless layers of dreamy, melodic bliss’ BBC IntroducingTorquay five-piece Tourists combine elements of shoegaze and synth-pop with deeper-rooted post-punk influences, crafting their own identifiable brand of dark, melodic dream-pop.
Their long-awaited, Daniel Schlett (The War on Drugs, DIIV) produced, debut album, Another State, is an album exploring the shadowy recesses of the human mind and existence, across eleven darkly compelling and utterly immersive dreampop songs, drawing on shoegaze, Krautrock, post-post and synthpop influences.
The brooding, multi-faceted soundscapes of Another State – released in November 2020 – offers an often melodic, sometimes knife-edged, and always enveloping backdrop to the album’s lyrical themes of control, manipulation and escapism, observed with a needle point astuteness, and an overriding message that all is not what it seems on the surface.
The foreboding post-punk and Krautrock energy of album opening track Silent Type explores the appearance of social anxiety, and the misconception that introverts are less threatening than their more outwardly aggressive extroverted counterparts. On Perception Management and Smokescreen, the psychological analysis of the human condition moves from the individual to the institutions to a backdrop of dark angular synth-pop recalling Joy Division or DIIV. The former takes aim at the manipulation of society by the ruling class, inspired by the Adam Curtis documentary ‘Hypernormalisation’, whilst the latter explores Graham Hancock’s banned TED talk ‘The War on Consciousness’, and the hypocrisy of drug laws.
The album’s title track, Another State, is about escapism, both lyrically speaking and sonically. A haze of droning organs, chiming guitars, and dreampop recalling Beach House, combine to create something blissed-out, melodic and expansive. A lush closing track which cements Tourists’ ability to create a record of rich layers that transports the listening from the angular foreboding knife-edge, through to the immersive blissed-out and transcendental.
Prior to recording their debut album Another State, Tourists released a string of early singles with their track Cut and Run receiving support from tastemakers such as Clash and DIY, with the single added to Spotify’s Global Viral 50 chart, garnering over half a million plays. Tourists followed this with a packed-out performance on the BBC Introducing Stage at Glastonbury.
Tourists wrote and recorded their debut album Another State during 2018, in the seclusion and solace of their Torquay rehearsal space. Cut off from the world and the pressures of working in a studio, they successfully achieved what they set out to do, to capture the atmosphere and energy of their live sets but within a tranquil setting. The band then decamped to Brooklyn to work with producer Daniel Schlett (The War on Drugs, DIIV) in 2019, before mastering the record with Simon Heyworth (Brian Eno, Imogen Heap, Nick Cave) of Super Audio Mastering.
_________________
TICKETS ON SALE NOW VIA SEETICKETS
Doors 7:30pm // Tickets available via SeeTickets // 14+, U18s must be accompanied by an adult
Event Venue
The Fiddler, Barnet, United Kingdom
Tickets
GBP 7.7