Sweden’s Echo Ladies have returned with their latest album Lilies and Matilda Bogren, Mattis Andersson, and Joar Andersén have once again pushed the boundaries of shoegaze and dream pop by continuing to explore what makes their sound.
Following their acclaimed debut Pink Noise in 2018, their sophomore album Lilies still draws inspiration from Jesus and the Mary Chain, A Place To Bury Strangers, and Slowdive, among others but allows Echo Ladies to tread between the darkness and light within their music with relative ease and grace.
The track that echoes with 80’s synth darkness is “Dirty Dancing”. There’s something haunting and melancholy about the song that just hits the heart and makes one sigh, maybe even cry. While “Coming Home” and “Illness” are the antithesis. The tracks are upbeat, fast, and furious for the Echo Ladies and the guitars and drums have a Edge and Larry Mullen Jr. sound that is wonderful to the ears.
Midway through the album, one will find the title track and it literally and figuratively serves as the centrepiece of the record.
On the song, the band says,
The saddest song we’ve ever written. Two friends of ours both lost their fathers during a short period of time, and one of us went through a bad break-up, so the song is mainly about suddenly losing someone close to you, and the experience of trying to move on in life. We’ve always talked about having a key-change in one of our songs but never came to it, so this time we added two.
The further comments on the lead single, “Awake” that was released earlier in the year,
‘Awake’ is a song about the feeling of drifting apart from each other in a relationship. The feeling of being left behind and forgotten and how small of a person that makes you feel, hoping it’s all a bad dream and wishing to wake up again.
The Echo Ladies‘ mantra is “nothing ever lasts,” and while the good and bad do come and go, the emotions and thoughts evoked by listening to Lilies will linger. It will remind those who take a journey with the band that dream pop is not always drenched in melancholy or sadness, and that emotionally charged music can be both beautiful and uplifting.
MUST LISTEN TRACKS: “Dirty Dancing”, “Coming Home”, “Lilies”, “Awake”, “Strangers”
FAVOURITE TRACKS: “Coming Home”, “Illness”, “Strangers”
