Track Of The Day: Dronningen – ‘Superstardom’

London-based Italians, Beatrice Bonnano (vocals/guitar) and Vito Cerasia (lead guitar), formed Dronningen (meaning Queen in Norwegian) in 2014 and have been gigging on the London scene for a number of years. They’ve released three EPs thus far and in a live setting originally possessed a grunge-inspired rock vibe with pop undertones. Having re-jigged their band line-up they have metamorphosed into an electro-tinged rock beast – their live set-up now streamlined to a three-piece with beloved session drummer, Alberto Voglino. 

Their new single takes off like a rocket, as per the opening line, and is a super-charged anthem of drone attack buzzy guitars and synth bass rhythms the size of a cruise liner. ‘Superstardom’ kicks up a gear as the kaleidoscopic chorus bursts into the room, riding high on a bed of warm layered vocals. This lot aren’t taking any prisoners. Is this rock, pop or dance music? Who cares when it sounds this fresh!  

Discussing their new single, the band explain: “‘Superstardom’ is a song about fighting self-sabotage… It’s about reaching a flourishing state after working towards fulfilling your goals, without inhibitions. We feel this song is highly relatable to many in a society where you’re made to feel like you’re never good enough. Ultimately, our message is this: just focus on doing your thing and do it well for yourself, filter out all the background noise and pressure”.

Starved of performing live during lockdown, the band were afforded a moment of clarity and space to invest in creativity. They took to writing new material and Vito grappled with self-teaching himself video production, which bore fruit in the shape of the technical wizardry that is the music clip for January’s ‘Theatrical Love’ single. 

On the recent Italian election win of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party, Beatrice and Vito voice their concern: “We hope that the victory of politicians who won the general election by stoking hatred and using inflammatory rhetoric will not be interpreted by some as a free pass to attack minorities or whoever they think is the enemy. There can be no going back over hard-won rights, such as abortion, same-sex unions and basic support for asylum seekers. Nobody wants to live in a Margaret Atwood novel. We deeply love our home country so we hope for the best.” 

Speaking of subjects which the band have far more control over, they confide: “Our plan for next year is releasing more music, more live shows and, most importantly, we have a debut album on the horizon”. As the band say: “Your life is now. Your time to thrive is now”.


Dronningen will be headlining The Victoria in Dalston, London on Saturday, 12th November – free tickets are available on Dice. Hear more from Dronningen on their Bandcamp page.

Mandy Bang
@mandybang

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FIVE FAVOURITES: Ora Cogan

Ora Cogan is not easily categorised. Since releasing her 2007 debut, Tatter, the Canadian artist has continued to evolve in intriguing ways, not only as a musician but as an activist, filmmaker, photographer and writer. Her new EP, Dyed, follows 2020’s shapeshifting album, Bells in the Ruins, and finds her exploring gradations of shoegaze and experimental folk succoured through shadows and light. As well as the high and airy title track, described as “a cryptic rumination on awkward love,” there’s a cloudy, ephemerally anxious mood piece (‘Diver’) and a tantalising cover of PJ Harvey’s ‘To Bring You My Love’, completely reimagined within Ora’s rapt soundworld.

We think one of the best ways to get to know an artist is by asking what music inspires them. To celebrate the release of Dyed, we caught up with Ora to ask about the music that has inspired her the most. See below for their choices of her five favourite albums, and be sure to catch her on tour with Aoife Nessa Frances in November. Full list of headline and support dates here.

 

1. Buffy Sainte-Marie – Coincidence and Likely Stories
One of my favourite memories of this record is from when I was a kid. My mum and I had picked up my godmother on the side of a highway for a roadtrip. I think my godmum had just finished doing some kind of farm work, but I’m not sure. She’d click her rings on the dashboard, singing along to every song on this record at the top of her lungs as we drove through the desert. Buffy Sainte-Marie is a legend, she’s one of the greatest songwriters alive and has many mind-blowing albums of course, but Coincidence and Likely Stories was the first record of hers I heard that I fell in love with. I keep going back to these songs. Her work continues to inspire me to write honestly, to try to use songwriting as a way of finding understanding in life, in politics, in love. She inspires me to write songs that speak truth to power.

2. Fiver – Audible Songs from Rockwood
Audible Songs from Rockwood is a monumental piece of work. This record is comprised of songs Fiver (Simone Schmidt) wrote after of years of research on inmates incarcerated in the Rockwood Asylum for “the criminally insane” in Kingston, Ontario, between 1856 and 1881. The songs speak of these women’s lives and dig into matters of the heart, the justice system, colonialism, ableism. This record is more than a record, with 30 pages of liner notes featuring illustrations, history, and context for the songs. I first heard Fiver when I opened for them at one of the stops on their tour in support of this album, and they had the whole audience spellbound. I look up to them as an artist so much, and this project was such generous work.

3. Marika Papagika – The Further the Flame, The Worse It Burns Me
Marika Papagika moved to New York City from Greece and became a prolific recording artist there. She eventually opened a club with her husband in the ‘20s and had a successful music career, but that ended abruptly with the Wall Street Crash of 1929. I fell in love with Marika Papagika after Eric Isaacson at Mississippi Records introduced me to her work. Rumbetiko feels vital and familiar as I grew up listening to Jewish folk music that can sometimes have similar vocal lines. Marika’s voice felt relatable, and this record will always hold so much magic for me. Marika inspires me endlessly to be a better singer.

4. Nina Simone – Sings the Blues
The opening track, ‘Do I Move You’, kills me every time. You can hear people yelling in the recording, they were feeling it so much. I first heard this album when my friend Jeremy from Shearing Pinx was DJing a bush party a few hours north of Nanaimo. The song was echoing across a lake, and I swear I could feel the whole natural world saying, ‘Yes, Nina Simone, you move us, you move everything. The whole universe bends towards you.’ I might have been high, but it’s still the truth. She was truly the best.

5. White Magic – Through the Sun Door
White Magic (Mira Billotte) has been one of my favorite musicians forever. I first heard her when she was a part of the Washington D.C. group Quix*o*tic; their song ‘The Breeze’ stopped me dead in my tracks. My friends and I used to stay up all night crafting or painting with Through the Sun Door on repeat. For us, I think, this album was our touchstone, like a secret passageway to an alternate reality. Some music opens up entire worlds, and for me this was a teleportation device. This record is intimate but spacious. Some of it feels like tavern music, punk, psychedelic folk and experimental music at the same time. I love the unique arrangements. I don’t know any other music that breathes like this does.

Thanks to Ora Cogan for sharing her Five Favourites with us!

Watch her video for ‘Diver’ below.

Dyed, the new EP from Ora Cogan, is out now via her own label Prism Tongue Records.

Photo Credit: Journey Meyerhoff

Alan Pedder
@alanthology

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Track Of The Day: Weekend Recovery – ‘Chemtrails’

Weekend Recovery’s latest track, ‘Chemtrails‘, is a direct response to the rampant spread of misinformation, both on unregulated social channels and in the mainstream news media. From start to finish, the song captures the emotional journey of watching dangerous lies spread through your community. It takes the frustration and annoyance of that experience, and condenses it into a few minutes of unbelievably catchy music.

‘Chemtrails’ hits heavy from the start, with fuzzy guitars, throbbing drums and lyrics delivered in a way that aches with feeling driving them. By titling the track, the band have created a clever metaphor that bleeds into its structure – it takes a conspiracy theory popularised by tools spreading misinformation, and uses it to critique those exact tools. It’s a fun parallel that shows the group’s skills when it comes to crafting lyrics with depth, nuance and sharp commentary.

The lyrics strike that delicate balance between being relatable, while still capturing a specific moment. A huge proportion of the people listening to this song will know the exhaustion of hearing another tired cover of Freebird at an open mic; it wouldn’t surprise me if the band (perhaps each member individually) and every one of those listeners will have the face in mind of a specific bland performer who finally tipped the scales and made Freebird unlistenable for them. These words are fuelled by vocals soaked with feeling – there is an initial aggression to them that captures the rage you feel seeing people legitimise dangerous lies. They relax into an almost spoken section heavy with sarcasm that is cathartic to hear. These are bookended by upbeat, bouncy lines that let you fall back into the space where, if nothing else, you have to laugh at the situation. The strings ramp up to the climatic finish to wrap all those emotions into a powerful scream, which swiftly drops back into the bouncy vocals before it implodes like your mental health after too much time in the wrong corner of Twitter.

In ‘Chemtrails’, Weekend Recovery have captured the nuanced anguish of being caught in a constant untrustworthy news cycle, and made it catchy as hell at the same time.

Kirstie Summers
@ActuallyKurt

Photo Credit: Keira Anee Photography

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ALBUM: A Void – ‘Dissociation’

Since their formation, A Void – the London-via-Paris triple threat of guitarist/vocalist Camille Alexander, bassist Aaron Hartmann, and drummer/backing vocalist Marie Niemiec – have been channelling their societal frustrations into a style of unapologetic alt-noise-grunge all of their own, with a punk-as-fuck riot grrrl attitude. From their 2016 EP, Roses As Insides, to their 2018 debut LP, Awkward and Devastated, A Void exude cathartic rage through raw visceral energy.

Mixed and mastered by Jason Wilson at Stakeout Studios, A Void’s sophomore LP Dissociation is a more mature record, spanning a song-writing period of two years, but no less aggressive than their previous offerings. Opening with the one-two punch of ‘Sad Events Reoccur’ – a six-minute punk rager presented in two parts – the trio take no prisoners with a Dinosaur Jr.-esque fuzz.

Propelled by L7 inspired chaotic energy and Hartmann’s heavy-as-fuck basslines, Alexander and Niemiec’s sing/screaming vocal harmonies throughout ‘Stepping on Snails’ encourage us to break free from anxiety, and embrace life through hypnotic grunge. Alexander’s intoxicating punk guitar groove throughout ‘One of a Kind’ is relatively calm in contrast to the trashing breakdown of ‘Newspapers’ – “Instead of destroying myself, I decided to destroy everyone’s ears!” – and its doom-sounding counterpart ‘Bag of Skulls’. Whiplash is expected!

‘Sick As a Dog’ follows as a dark, cathartic track detailing the fear of abandonment; “the idea of channelling pain through several emotional states”. Mental health is a reoccurring theme in the band’s lyrics – Alexander not shying away from her emotions as she screams with a sense of hopelessness: “When all the changes make you lose the plot / and bring you into a state of dissociation.”

From the distorted guitar sludge of ‘2B Seen’ to the softer dissonant strings of ‘5102’, A Void’s bewitching sound is vampiric, demanding your energy as you headbang along to the snap of Niemiec’s rhythm, and Alexander’s emotional outbursts: “I’d rather face my fears alone than with someone like you / …toxic mermaids are swimming around you / They wanna suck all the blood that’s inside you!”

Taking inspiration from nineties punk-infused grunge, reminiscent of Hole, Silverchair and Sonic Youth, the nostalgia-inducing playfulness of ‘In Vain’ and ‘Bad Habits’ leads to the anthemic closing track ‘Sonic Untitled’ – a vitriolic attack on toxic masculinity. “Just give and give and give and give and give and get nothing! / So scared to live in the shadow of a woman…”

“When you compose an album like this, each song is a reflection of a different personality…”, the band explain. From mental health and heartbreak to womanhood, A Void confidently stage-dive into twelve cathartic tracks of justified punk rock angst; delivering a deeply personal record of riotous grunge.


Dissociation, the new album from A Void, is out now. Buy here.

Ken Wynne
@Ken_Wynne

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