Caroline Polachek

Caroline Elizabeth Polachek, better known as Caroline Polachek (New York, June 20, 1985), is an American singer-songwriter devoted to a refined brand of avant-pop.

The daughter of James Montel Polachek, a market analyst and classically trained musician, and Elizabeth Allan, she moved with her family to Tokyo, where she lived until the age of six, before relocating to Greenwich, Connecticut. There Polachek joined her school choir and began developing her interest in music. As a teenager she started frequenting New York, where she had the chance to attend various post-hardcore, emo, punk and jazz shows. She then formed Chairlift with Aaron Pfenning in October 2005, while both were attending the University of Colorado Boulder. In 2007 bassist Patrick Wimberly joined to complete the group's lineup. That same year Chairlift released the self-produced EP "Daylight Savings", followed by their debut LP "Does You Inspire You" (2008). After Pfenning's departure in 2010, Chairlift carried on as a duo, releasing two further albums, "Something" (2012) and "Moth" (2016), on Columbia. The band broke up, however, after one last tour held in spring 2017.

At the same time, starting in 2014, Polachek launched a solo career, releasing the album "Arcadia", recorded at Villa Medici (Rome) under the name Ramona Lisa. This was followed by "Drawing The Target Around The Arrow", an instrumental work released under the moniker CEP (the initials of her full name, Caroline Elizabeth Polachek). On October 18, 2019 came her first album released under the name Caroline Polachek, "Pang". It's an eccentric pop diary in which Caroline lets all the different paths she's explored across her various projects converge, building songs suspended between the brashest contemporaneity and a timeless aura, bittersweet yet suddenly seized by a bizarre energy that reverberates through both the handling of sonic space and her performances, among the most intense and focused of her career. Buoyed by a refined aesthetic, a production handled together with fellow PC Music affiliate Danny L Harle (kept in check here in his more irreverent games) and a sense of songwriting capable of showing competence across its many registers, the record flows sinuous and effervescent at once.

In 2023 Polachek made the definitive leap in quality with "Desire, I Want To Turn Into You", managing to reconcile the ambitions of a sophisticated pop star with her past as a baroque vocalist, her hyperpop associations and pastoral abstractions worthy of a contemporary Arcadia. An explosive concept album about desire and its violently escapist power, "Desire, I Want To Turn Into You" is a record whose center of gravity is constantly shifting, a pop work that honors its own irregular, wandering nature, chasing the force of instinct song after song. Among the countless ways of losing oneself behind a dream, the mirages presented here are among the most convincing. With imaginative production (handled, barring a few exceptions, solely alongside Danny L Harle) and arrangement choices that often blend acoustic and electronic elements with the ease of the finest folktronica artists.

Throughout her career, starting in 2009, Polachek has also collaborated with many artists including Flosstradamus, Washed Out, Blood Orange, Delorean, SBTRKT, Sébastien Tellier, Fischerspooner, Charli XCX, Christine and the Queens and Beyoncé. For the latter, she produced the song “No Angel” (2013), featured on “Beyoncé” (2013).

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google