ORANGE VINYL.
Danish composer Astrid Sonne opens up her heart on 'Great Doubt', singing candidly for the first time over powdery beats and jerky instrumentation (assisted by none other than Slauson Malone, Ben Vince, Levitation Orchestra's Emma Barnaby and Alvilda Reiter Jakobsen), and even referencing Mariah Carey. It's a revelation - and funny in places too - properly in line with Tirzah, ML Buch and HTRK.
We almost didn't recognize Sonne when we first spun 'Great Doubt'. Her voice - not her viola or rack of synths - takes the spotlight on 'Do you wanna', murmuring gently over brittle, tightly reverberating drums that Sonne plays herself. It's a far cry from the pitchy, jazz-inflected psychedelia of 2021's 'outside of your lifetime' or its vaporous predecessor 'Human Lines'. "Do you wanna have a baby?" she asks ruefully, leaving the question unanswered at first, room for strings, piano and subtle synths to reply. She strips herself naked, wondering what it might mean to bring a child into the world; it scrapes against Tirzah's 'Colourgrade' not just sonically but thematically. On that album, Tirzah contemplated motherhood and family - here, Sonne weighs up her choices, using the track's emptiness to suggest emotional malnutrition. "I don't know," she finally relents.
'Give my all' follows with boxy, disney strings and orchestral phrases that bring an uncanny drama to Sonne's blunt words. She sounds confident and forthright as she paraphrases Maria Carey: "I'd give my all to have / just one more night with you." The plasticity of the backdrop only makes the words resonate further, and it's this push and pull between artificiality and raw sensitivity that makes 'Great Doubt' so captivating. There's an unmistakable trip-hop impetus to 'Boost', that features Sonne on drums again, playing slowly alongside sampled woodwinds and fictile synths. There are no vocals on this one, so the instrumentation stands in, winding in and out of tune to poke out towards the boundaries. It's at this moment when Sonne sounds closest to her sometime collaborator ML Buch, bridging the gap between traditional songwriting and a simulated new age. But Sonne doesn't sound as if she's trying to approximate pop, just bare her soul more frankly.
And there are traces of her earlier material on the stand-out 'Staying here', when she coos more animatedly over organ-like arpeggios and digitized stabs. We can hear outlines of classic Enya or Kate Bush on this one, and while it's beatless, it sounds as if it's rushing towards a drop that never comes - all tension, no release. "Everything is unreal," she cries. "But I'm not going anywhere." Then we're led out with the folk-y 'Overture', that features Ben Vince on sax, and dubby closer 'Say you love me', the biggest indicator that she's now based in London. It's the most revealing, heart-puncturing material we've heard from Sonne to date, a hyper-literate wirework of influences and skills that's put together with care and no small amount of restraint. We're sold.
