Mew - The Angel's Flight

A child bullfighter, posing decked out in full regalia, a noble inscrutability in his gaze. A comic-strip girl, red hair framing her pale face, immersed in darkness with her small panda. A butterfly and an egg, two eggs, five eggs, overlapping, make up the face of a sinister, smiling creature. A stylized little angel, diving downward. A song of androgynous purity, soaring in complex yet candidly familiar melodies, while as its counterpoint a bacchanal rages, waged by a Telecaster as sharp as a blade, sinking its dissonant blows into disorienting syncopations, by a bass that is at once a granite-solid anchor and a destabilizing stick of dynamite, and by an untamed, creative percussive fury that never submits to events but rather steers the moods and performances of everyone else.

As intrinsically limited (and limiting) as it is fundamentally essential, how can a critical/explanatory outlook position itself in front of an anomaly so "other" from common sensibility that it always manages to slip free of the categorizations naturally needed to explain it? In concrete terms: how do you explain the Mew universe to a listener - so open to manifold influences, yet at the same time so granite-solidly and fatally self-referential?

There is certainly the path of meticulous technical-aesthetic analysis, which is what this piece, from the next paragraph on, hopes to accomplish. But there is also the path of pure impulse, of the purest intuition - the one that doesn't need to rationalize the material to still grasp its essence, even more deeply. And so one can rely on the iconographic keys the band themselves have left us in their covers or in their logo: fragile, tender, childlike, graceful - they symbolize, better than anything, the music they represent. Or, one can simply surrender to the complex sonic ecstasy produced by these four Danes, as imaginative and self-sufficient as very few other things in the last twenty years of pop music.

There's Something Indie in Denmark

Copenhagen, 1991. In the imagination of the average music/film buff, a country that doesn't have all that much to offer, like Denmark, had not yet produced the cinematic manifesto Dogme 95 (even though its most celebrated author, Lars Von Trier, had already made three feature films), and the eurodance fever - to which Hamlet's homeland would contribute solid acts such as Whigfield (and some less solid ones, like Aqua), and which would soon spread across the whole Continent - was only just beginning to take hold. In short, a no man's land, with all the aridity that implies, but also the exciting possibilities that such a situation can offer.

This is the context in which the three high-schoolers at the heart of this story, all born in '76, took their first steps: Jonas Bjerre (vocals and rhythm guitar), Bo Madsen (lead guitar) and Jonah Wohlert (bass) met each other as teenagers while working on a bizarre short film for a school project, in which they starred as fresh-faced leads.

The spark caught quickly, once they discovered their shared inclinations, and within a few years Mew became a reality, thanks to the addition, in 1995, of Silas Graae, a drummer as young (born in '79!) as he was talented.

After just a few months the quartet recorded a six-song demo tape, some of which would later make their way onto the debut album. The material is still very rough, to the point that the comic-book aesthetic of the artwork - which would be picked up almost wholesale for the debut album - comes across as far more focused than the songs themselves.

We have to wait until January 1997 for news of our heroes again, but the patience of their still-small fanbase was well rewarded: released on the essentially self-founded label Exlibris Musik, the very first Mew single, "I Should Have Been A Tsin-Tsi (For You)" (complete with a video directed by none other than a young Nicolas Winding Refn), is a vaguely Eastern-tinged indie-pop fragment, perhaps thin melodically, but already hinting at a string of small, admirable tricks unknown to the vast majority of young emerging acts; structurally, in fact, the song begins with the canonical verse-chorus pattern (albeit in 6/4 rather than 4/4), but the following two verses are instrumental, the first laced with crackling guitars, the second with an amusing synth solo. The result is that the chorus, being the only vocal line repeated several times, rises to a sort of mantra of the absurd.

That same April saw the release of the corresponding debut album, A Triumph For Man. In the years to come, the quartet would, surprisingly, often cite American indie-rock bands such as Pixies or Dinosaur Jr. as fundamental inspirations for their work. Beyond the "indie pose," which seems to be the toll anyone must pay to gain even a minimum of visibility with certain kinds of audiences and journalists, it is indeed undeniable that on this first record the alternative aesthetic dominant between the late 80s and early 90s - both British (jangle-pop, shoegaze) and American (alt-rock, lo-fi) - acts as the pivot around which the moods of every track revolve. Despite the immaturity inherent to a project created by guys barely in (or just out of) their twenties, this debut already harbors the seeds of a highly inventive ensemble, ready to push beyond the usual pop formulas at the first opportunity: just listen to the 7/8 groove of "Panda" (the second single pulled from the album), or the dark viola arrangement that helps create a madrigal-like atmosphere on the mybloodyvalentine-esque "Snowflake" (the record's crown jewel), or again the odd accents and trumpet flourishes found on "Wheels Over Me," unusual choices for a fast, Smiths-like song such as this.

Ultimately, this is a solid debut, still quite far from the glories that would follow, but one that manages to make the best of a bad situation—in other words, it succeeds in creating an effective introverted mood by leaning into a low-fidelity sound, dictated more by scarce financial resources than by any genuine artistic inclination.

The wheel slowly starts turning: the following year Mew took part in Denmark's most important festival (as well as one of the most famous in Europe), namely Roskilde, although they were still far from the grandiose performances they would go on to deliver in their six future appearances there.

As the new millennium dawned, the band released their second studio album, Half Of The World Is Watching Me, with the same production team as before. It's a very sui generis record, since most of its tracklist is made up of songs that would later be re-recorded for the "London rebirth" on the following album, Frengers. As we'll see, those re-recordings would be improved so dramatically in terms of production quality, instrumental dynamics and depth of sound that they make this sophomore effort look like little more than a demo tape—albeit an excellent one, given the sheer quality of the songs on it.

Even the most devoted fan is still advised to give it a general listen, if only out of curiosity, to hear how the spectre of progressive rock was already beginning to loom over the band in the embryonic form of "156". Among the previously unreleased tracks, worth noting is the lovely, carefree melody of "Mica", the third single taken from the album.

Accommodating the ever-greater, legitimate ambitions of a band that had come to understand its enormous artistic—but also commercial—potential, 2001 would prove to be a year of major changes: first and foremost, keyboardist Nick Watts, formerly of English band Headswim, joined the live line-up on a permanent basis to enrich the sound on stage, and, more importantly still, the band signed their first prestigious international deal, with Epic Music UK, a Sony subsidiary.

From here on, things would take a decisive turn.

Don't you just love goodbyes?

The frantic activity that precedes the "big leap": this is probably the favourite moment for any musician lucky enough to be in a band that sooner or later actually did make that leap. Knowing fate is on your side, and going along with it: that's how you can explain the Danes' 2002-2003 season, made up of a tour through that future Scandinavia that would soon yield devoted followers, in support of Swedish band Kent, and of the release of four singles promoting the band's third album, released in March 2003: Frengers.

Let's be clear: we're talking about a masterpiece, one capable of crystallising a great many of the moods present in pop and rock—alternative or otherwise—at the turn between the late Nineties and the start of the new millennium, while at the same time standing as a dazzling one-off in terms of originality and innovation. A satellite capable of devouring dream-pop, emocore, progressive and post-punk, yet remaining stubbornly up in the stratosphere, indifferent to human affairs. This tension between belonging to the surrounding musical reality and being equally detached from it is a contradiction that would never again recur with such force in Mew's career.

Then again, all of Mew's music thrives on enormous contradictions, impossible to resolve except through forced coexistence: what deranged lunatic could think of violating a sweet lullaby with a guitar-bass-drums funk groove so violent it would embarrass any Red Hot Chili Peppers (or is it the other way around?), as happens in "Snow Brigade"? And if you start picking apart what happens in "Am I Wry? No", the first single and the cornerstone track of the band's whole aesthetic, you risk losing your mind. Don't believe me? I can already picture you: put the track on your stereo and don't believe your ears—some of the finest 55 seconds of instrumental intro of your life, right? What crystalline arpeggios—these guys really did learn the lesson of the American emo school, what romanticism in those guitars! But where on earth did those madmen in the rhythm section put the accents? You didn't even notice, did you? Meanwhile, Bjerre has started singing, and his falsetto has already broken your heart. I know, I know, it happened to me too. And it also happened to me to get so swept up in that vortex that I failed to notice the countless structural and technical subtleties that enrich the song—but our heroes had already thought of the fact that we might get used to it, and so, bless them, three-quarters of the way through the song they completely flip the script, with a dark and particularly crooked (this is the chord progression: F/C#/F#/Bb/D#/G#/C#/F#) final ostinato of acoustic guitar, piano and impenetrable lyrics (“A diamond ring/ But you can’t find it/ Cold is the night”). A real mess, in other words. And yet the song has the gift of lodging itself in your head from the very first listen, like the most irritating of earworms. And all this without even needing a proper chorus! We were talking about contradictions, weren't we?

In any case, the whole album is packed with ideas that would make the career of entire bands on their own: in the other big single, "156", verses with a strong Crimson-like flavour build up tension in a bridge alternating between 6/4 and 7/4, before spilling into the most melancholic and sublime power-pop chorus you could imagine (how can you not be moved singing along to "Don't you just love goodbyes?"). "She Came Home For Christmas" (the second single taken from the album, and already present on the first record, albeit in a much rougher form) and "Simmetry" are two sumptuous, piano-driven ballads: while the former, telling the story of an abandonment with the tenderness of a caress, almost seems to anticipate, with even greater grace, the sweetest moments of Arcade Fire, the latter is at once dreamy and hieratic, built on a Genesis-style melody sung in two-part harmony by Bjerre and a young girl, and is undoubtedly one of the most intense moments of the entire record.

Closing out a very fluid album, a perfect alternation of fast tracks, slow ones, and others not easily pigeonholed ("Behind The Drapes"), comes the final, consecrating seal: the symphonic "Comforting Sounds". Over a canvas that in many ways recalls the orchestral dream-pop of Mercury Rev's "Deserter's Songs", this extra-large song manages to express feelings of deep unease and a desire to share one's own suffering (“Into your house/ Why don’t we share our solitude?/ Nothing is pure anymore but solitude”), building to a catharsis of unbearable purity in the vocalising of the miles-long final theme. It's a Big Music crescendo so evocative it could have taught Sigur Ros how to do their job properly, without ever becoming tedious or laboured.

Buoyed by a production rich in detail and layering, finally a match for the compositions it contains, Frengers stands as an album that is as paradigmatic—and in some ways ahead of its time with respect to third-millennium indie-rock—as it remains, to this day, criminally underrated by international critics. If we were to risk a comparison, we might find some parallels with English band My Vitriol's 2001 masterpiece "Finelines", both in stylistic terms (although that record sounds "heavier" and more shoegaze) and in its ability to capture the moods of the era, as well as in the scant regard it received from the Anglo-Saxon music intelligentsia. The outcome for their respective careers, however, would be completely different: while the unlucky My Vitriol are still awaited a follow-up, for Mew the most thrilling part of the journey had only just begun.

Am I twisted? Yes! Or "How I Learned to Love Progressive and Stopped Worrying"

In 2003, the fruitful love affair between Mew and Denmark exploded into full bloom: at the Danish Music Awards the four-piece performed a striking rendition of "Snow Brigade", complete with fake snow blown onto their faces by wind machines, and they were among the headline names at the prestigious Roskilde festival. This was also when their bond with Indonesia began—an astonishing land of devoted fans in the years to come—and their name started appearing in the specialist music press of Great Britain.

In 2005 the band returned to Scandinavia, but this time as support act for none other than Rem (apparently it was Stipe himself who enthusiastically requested them). A genuine triumph. But there was certainly no time to rest on their laurels - quite the opposite, they had to ride the wave: so in September 2005 came Mew And The Glass Handed Kites, the album most beloved by fans of the Danish outfit.

"Don't judge a book by its cover", the saying goes, and contrary to the advice given at the start of this piece, never has it been more worth trusting this maxim: despite the garish matryoshka-doll arrangement of their faces on the album's sleeve, Bjerre and co. push even further than they had on Frengers, both in terms of compositional ambition and grandeur. Indeed, the fourteen songs making up the record are linked in a 54-minute sonic continuum, able to range across the mood shifts that are by now typical of the band, brushing against their extremes with disarming versatility, often through tracks of considerable length.

To cut things short, the progressive rock suggestions already hinted at on the previous record are made explicit here, underpinning a tracklist with a darker, more dramatic tone than ever before. But since we're still talking about Mew, production duties fall to Michael Beinhorn, who had previously worked with Marilyn Manson, Korn and Prodigy, and never before have guitar and bass sounded so raw, dirty, one step removed from grunge. The ambition remains very high, and trying to make such different worlds coexist is, at least in theory, an extremely difficult task. And yet, it must be said, the record contains moments that even surpass, in evocative power and technical finesse, the already wonderful splendour of Frengers: towering above all, from the very first listens, is the trio of singles "Apocalypso"-"Special"-"Zookeeper's Boy", not placed in sequence in the middle of the tracklist by chance, highlighting their role as the beating heart of the album.

In the first of these tracks, the record's true star takes centre stage: guitarist Bo Madsen. His jagged, nervy style, stubbornly off the beat and practically never a true "soloist" in the commonly understood sense of the term, finds here a shining example of its effectiveness: the abrasive opening riff is the engine driving the rest of the track, dictating its twisted yet solemn atmosphere, as becomes clear in the liberating arena-rock chorus. "Special" is perhaps the best-known song in the Danes' entire catalogue, and it really is hard to resist the grip of a perfectly engineered pop hook, even though, once again, we're faced with a continual departure from pop's basic rules (with a bit of mental flexibility, you could say there are four choruses packed in here). In a sense, the band's tenth single is the song post-"Kid A" Radiohead never managed to write: intricate, dark, indie, perversely catchy. The last piece of this trilogy, "Zookeeper's Boy", is the highest point of the entire tracklist: like a marvellous baroque fresco, the vocal harmonies in the choruses leave you breathless, and seem to point the way towards M83's future "Skin Of The Night", while the instrumental backing paints, with impressive maturity, the band's usual unpredictable rhythmic and structural shifts.

Two other highlights of this And The Glass Handed Kites are the two big closing ballads: "White Lips Kissed", sorrowful and romantic, is the record's Banks-like peak, with its sumptuous mellotron carpets, while "Louise Louisa" is, by contrast, very American, almost alt-country, even as it stretches past seven minutes, reaching its dramatic zenith in the final pleas, broken with emotion ("Stay with me/ Don't want to be alone").

Although it suffers from some overlong passages and a few superfluous ideas (chiefly the two collaborations with J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., whose voice sits awkwardly against the quartet's dreamy atmospheres) that place it, overall, a notch below the previous Frengers, the album is the grandiloquent manifesto of mid-2000s Mew, the only "indie rock stadium band" in the world, as they themselves like to describe their sound, and it further amplifies their success, at home and abroad: it reaches number two on the Danish charts, and number four in both Norway and Finland.

At the 2006 Danish Music Awards, the band then swept up prizes, and even U2 heaped praise on them. A thoroughly respectable achievement for a non-English-speaking act. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, but in April of that same year, Johan Wohlert, the band's longtime bassist and a key figure among the founders, left the group, following his personal wish to devote more time to caring for his newborn son.

But what seemed like a terrible blow for a group of close friends, even before they were bandmates, would soon turn into the best possible blessing - if not for the band itself, stripped of a strong personality, then certainly for their devoted fanbase.

In another world

After reaping the rewards sown by And The Glass Handed Kites throughout 2006, the surviving trio carried out the most classic of moves - "locking themselves away in the studio to write music" - isolating themselves from the rest of the world to record their fifth album, the one that would bring their definitive consecration, between New York's legendary Electric Lady Studios and Copenhagen.

A full four years after its predecessor, buoyed by expectations that had by then become truly considerable, Mew released, in August 2009, their absolute masterpiece, the crowning achievement of an extraordinary creative season: No More Stories Are Told Today I'm Sorry They Washed Away // No More Stories The World Is Grey I'm Tired Let's Wash Away, which also saw Rich Costey return to the production chair, following his fortunate stint on Frengers.

Records, or works of art in general, often rise to the status of cornerstones of an entire discipline also because of their relevance and centrality within their historical context, not (only) in terms of popularity, but above all because of their ability to channel the spirit of their time, capturing its moods and sublimating them into artistic creation. Well, what makes No More Stories... an exceptional record is exactly the opposite: its complete detachment from any prevailing aesthetic current of its time, itself already quite unstable, considering we're talking about a pivotal year for pop music like 2009. Too technical to be filed under the post-punk revival or the new synth-pop school, not epic enough to match the White Lies's debut, nor remotely as schizoid as nu rave, further than ever even from American alternative rock, thanks to a drastic shift in atmosphere - here far more subdued and rarefied, in keeping with Jonas Bjerre's increasingly introspective vein.

The range of arrangements is then considerably widened, thanks to a predominant use of keyboards and synthesisers, and the integration of drum machines, marimba and xylophones into the percussion section... It's no coincidence that, having lost a bassist with as titanic a sound as Wohlert, Silaas's drumming flair - nicknamed "The Magic Car" by his bandmates, an epithet to which the gorgeous, caressing, vocally intricate song of the same name is dedicated - comes through even more forcefully. No need to mince words: we're probably talking about the best drummer of his generation, and the absurdly destabilising work done between hi-hat and toms on the perfect pop song "Beach", the disorienting off-beats of the already crooked "Introducing Palace Players" (a math-pop masterpiece among the highlights of the whole Mew experience), or the shifting between 4/4 and 5/4 on opener "New Terrain" (just one of the countless instances of odd time signatures found here) are all there to prove it.

Never, on any other record, has everything been so exactly in its place; even the extremely long title - that is, the mantra sung in that fairy-tale enchantment that is "Hawaii Dream" - proves the perfect indicator of that wonderful childlike quality, bordering on the most magical sense of wonder, that has always been present in Mew, but which here is elevated to the load-bearing pillar of a record that is at times joyous, at times dark, at times deeply moving.

It's no accident that Bjerre's voice and Madsen's guitar, already leaning toward similar territory, move even closer to the poetics of Jon Anderson and Steve Howe, voice and guitar respectively of the legendary Yes, the most genuinely mystical and otherworldly representatives of the entire progressive rock canon. Take as an example the epic single "Repeaterbeater", all darting guitars and daring vocal leaps, if this comparison seems too bold, not to mention the mini-suite "Cartoons and Macramé Wounds", which unspools over seven minutes through odd time signatures, elaborate vocal layering, and a proto-ambient section closely related to the "I get up... I get down..." of "Close To The Edge". One should not, however, simply assume from such a clear influence that this is a sterile imitation of a pillar band of Seventies rock, since throughout the album, and all the more so on the aesthetic manifesto that is "Cartoons And Macramé Wounds", Mew's own brand of songwriting asserts itself with the firmness of a band that has reached total confidence in its own abilities, to the point of allowing itself an even more daring stylistic versatility than in the past: that's how, alongside the ever-present prog and dream-pop fascinations, a whirling cauldron of elements gets mixed in - synth pop ("Tricks Of The Trade"), darkwave ("Vaccine"), ethnic touches ("Hawaii"), sophisti-pop (present in the epic melancholy of "Sometimes Life Isn't Easy").

On this album, we also find the sublimation of the eternal conflicts the band has always fed on in crafting its work: No More Stories… is in fact a strongly pop record, yet so intricate that it takes countless listens to get to grips with it, or countless words to describe it exhaustively, without ever managing to fully capture its essence – an essence so pure it's incredibly simple, just like the magic at the heart of the best fairy tales.

As in all the best stories, it's the unresolvable allure of mystery that fuels curiosity, and that seems to be the nature of this 2009 masterpiece: seemingly accessible, yet impenetrable, like the solid figures wandering through the woods in the evocative video for "Introducing Palace Players", who never reveal their true nature.

And I’d rather be a satellite

Crowning an artistic achievement of such dazzling beauty and uniqueness came the biggest results the band had ever achieved, both at home and abroad: No More Stories… shot to number one on the Danish charts, number two in Norway and Finland, and turned up again and again in mostly glowing reviews (how could it be otherwise?) in music magazines and webzines across Europe and, finally, in the United States too. The long promotional tour would also bring plenty of satisfaction: among other experiences, they opened for Nine Inch Nails and Pixies, and played for the first time in Mexico and South Korea.

At this point a rather long hiatus began, marked by the release of the compilation Eggs Are Funny in 2010 and the expiry of their contractual obligations to Sony in 2011. It would take until 2013, however, for the band to fully break away from the prestigious label, pursuing an even more committed path toward artistic independence, since their next album would be produced and distributed entirely on their own.

It's also for this reason, as well as because of the unexpected return of bassist Johan Wolhert to the lineup, that fans had to wait a full six years – until April 27, 2015 – to hear the new Mew record, + –.

The mathematical suggestion in the title seems to extend to the album itself, since what we have here is an attempt to square the band's formula: ten tracks, a fairly standard number, and, more substantially, a decisive structural shift – from the youthful unpredictability and interchangeability of a song's various elements to a stricter adherence to the verse-chorus-middle eight scheme – are the first things that strike the ear on listening to "Plus Minus". That isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, so much so that one of the best tracks here is precisely one of the most conventional, the leaden single "Water Slides", a kind of Mew answer to the romantic r'n'b of The Weeknd.

The problem is that the album as a whole tends to give off a sense of weariness and fading inspiration, something entirely new at this point in our story, and which seems to be a consequence, rather than a cause, of the normalization at work. Even the technical finesse is scaled back, probably in search of a definitive mark of maturity, but the end result is overly polished, saccharine and, at times, even predictable. All of this may be down to the record's extremely long gestation and to a creative process so cerebrally drawn out that it drained the material of clarity and vigor – material that, it should be said, is by no means entirely bad. Quite the opposite.

Just consider the sheer quality of the dreamlike atmospheres created by the enveloping clouds of keyboards (superbly produced by Mew themselves with the help of Michael Beinhorn) on "Cross The River On Your Own" (the song post-Waters Pink Floyd would have wished they were even remotely capable of writing), or even more so in the successful funk-tinged experiment of "Making Friends", which also slips in an effective self-quotation from "Introducing Palace Players" in the syncopated electric guitar of the verses.

For the rest, unfortunately, a good portion of the tracklist suffers from unengaging melodies and excessive length (half the songs run past six minutes), but there are at least two gems here too, the ones where Mew truly sound like Mew: one of these is the explosive "Witness", barely three minutes long, with impetuous interlocking distorted guitars, blistering drums, an imposing sixteenth-note bassline and shout-along choruses the likes of which hadn't been heard since the days of And The Glass Handed Kites. The second is the opening track and the album's first single, which had rightly raised our hopes as fans: the majestic "Satellites". Here we're really talking about a masterpiece, yet another one by this point: the hermetic lyrics, almost a sequence of images drawn from some hypothetical coming-of-age film (“I wanna breath in the sunlight beam/ I wanna be with a girl like she/ Swimming fast/ Hone in on the buzz in ways you could not/ know my own electricity”), carry the song along on celestial harp arpeggios, Silas's constant, vaguely jazzy mini-solos and some of the finest vocal melodies of Bjerre's entire career, pushing it toward the status of a possible signature song for the band's whole artistic ars poetica, helped too by the liberating desire for total escape expressed in the choruses ("And I'd rather be a satellite/ And I'm picking the phone").

+ –, though uneven, further consolidates the success Mew had already achieved up to that point, as the band set off on the ensuing promotional tour starting in May 2015. Everything seems to be going well, until, out of a clear blue sky, a bolt of lightning strikes the band's supporters that summer: through a terse press release, it emerges that Bo Madsen, the band's historic and essential guitarist, will no longer be part of Mew. Just like that, with nothing more added. No information about family difficulties or urgent matters, artistic differences, or any kind of health problems. Just these few words, and the sudden replacement of Bo with a session player. We're not told, nor is it ultimately any of our business, what kind of rifts must have opened up between the members, but what's most worrying is having to imagine a future without such a crucial element in the band's overall makeup. It's true that the band's introverted nature has never made its internal creative dynamics particularly clear, but it's hard to believe that Madsen's contribution to songwriting wasn't nearly on a par with Jonas Bjerre's, if only for the guitar arrangements he brought to the table, always so valuable.

What's certain is that Mew currently have no intention of breaking up, and who knows, reduced to a trio, perhaps our heroes will manage to pull together again as they did back in the days of No More Stories…, making up for a final effort that isn't always inspired with the ultimate seal on a dazzling career, lived out for at least a decade at extremely high compositional levels and, however intrinsically unsuited to widespread popularity given the complexity of its music, nonetheless something of a forerunner of a certain progressive-pop sensibility that has been spreading in recent years between Japan (where the average technical skill of today's pop-rock bands is extremely high, and which is perhaps the only country in the world where the genre can still move the masses) and the English-speaking world (Alt-j, Everything Everything in England, the very recent Crying in America).

Still, even if the sacred flame of inspiration had physiologically burned out for these Danes, we'd really have nothing to complain about: all we'd need to do is go back and listen to their past creations and feel like the young protagonists of so many Japanese animated series from the mid-Nineties through the new Millennium. Vulnerable, full of insecurities, and yet, somehow, heroes, destined for extraordinary feats.

The band returned in 2017 with a concept album built entirely around the story of a man lost in the cyclical nature of time, in the madness of everyday life, and in a constant search for emotional serenity to be achieved without resorting to excessive delusions of grandeur or impossible dreams, thus staying humbly in touch with himself, perhaps also trying to make sense of the sad and indecipherable world around him. The seventh album of their career is titled Visuals, and it's also, notably, the first album without longtime guitarist Bo Madsen.

The album's dominant theme appears clear and limpid from the very first lines of “Nothingness and No Regrets”: “I don’t know what makes it grow/I know that seasons come and seasons go/Oh man, I don’t think I can/And you found it in your heart/And you don’t wanna see it pulled apart/Oh man, I don’t understand/In our polyester death/There is nothingness and no regrets/Oh I’m thinking of numbers/What’s your number?/What’s in a number?/Two numbers true”, with the band's customary collective ecstatic crescendo warming the heart. Søren Møller's keyboards and Johan Wohlert's bass play a fundamental role, lending the whole thing a sense of atmosphere and fluidity.

Visuals is an album packed with chromatic contrasts, a luminous work that once again shows the Danes' ability to craft harmonious interlocking parts, and to always deliver a climax that's unique in its own way, where everything is damnably meticulous and yet constantly shifting. Their style is thoroughly tried and tested, and the record even features a vintage-style sax (“Twist Quest”), while various melodies trace dreamy paths with a vague eye on the glorious Eighties (“85 Videos”). There's also room for moments of stillness and deeper reflection, with night bringing counsel (“I’m sworn to secrecy/But I need the light/Or else I’d never come clean/Now that your hands are/You keep your head low/Quietly, it’s you/Tonight, you look beautiful”). 

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