Should-stream: Go ‘Past The Veil’ with Seven Lions’ debut album – Dancing Astronaut
by: Rachel Narozniak
Oct 21, 2022
Within the dance/digital style, the place music is usually made and consumed independently of an album, a full-length LP isn’t a prerequisite for fulfillment. Of this, Seven Lions is effectively conscious.
Over the previous decade, the American DJ/producer born Jeff Montalvo has emerged as some of the propulsive forces within the popularization and evolution of melodic dubstep and melodic bass. And with founding credit to one of many dance/digital style’s most quickly aggrandizing labels (Ophelia Data) to his title, Seven Lions has attained a degree of acclaim sought by many, but achieved by few. He’s carried out all of it with out an album in his catalog, and that’s exactly why the discharge of his debut LP, Past The Veil, 10 years after his first EP (2012’s Polarize) has engaged dance/digital audiences not solely within the melodic dubstep and melodic bass areas, but in addition past.
Past The Veil arrives at some extent in Seven Lions’ profession the place he arguably has nothing to show, however because the meticulousness of the LP evidences, that’s not the perspective with which the top of Dancing Astronaut‘s 2021 Album of the Yr approached the endeavor. It’d be straightforward for Seven Lions to trend an album that panders to the sooner, nostalgia-inducing sounds of melodic dubstep and melodic bass, and undoubtedly, such an strategy can be celebrated by followers nonetheless. However Past The Veil—an LP ambiguous in title, but clear in its effort to embody a extra experimental, fluid, and mature offshoot of Seven Lions’ traditional sound—deserves reward for taking the highway much less traveled. Throughout a dozen tracklistings, Past The Veil proves to be a sentient and cerebral physique of labor. “Name On Me” with Vancouver Sleep Clinic and “Between” with Eli Teplin, for example, characterize a distinct, extra muted and introspective—however no much less putting—sonic strategy reflective of Seven Lions’ inventiveness.
Importantly, there’s a spot for melodic grandeur on Past The Veil, too. The emotive, melodic builds and breakdowns signature to Seven Lions have inimitably tugged at listeners’ coronary heart strings over time, and this pull will be felt at a number of junctures on the album. On this means, Past The Veil toggles between the acquainted and long-embraced and a much less anticipated, extra nascent type of Seven Lions’ sound.
“Tonally, this album shifted my sound a bit to a extra natural sound, and one that’s much less reliant on synths,” Seven Lions attested in a press launch asserting the album. “This album is the primary and presumably final album for me. I had an incredible time writing it, and I really feel like I obtained to inform a narrative that I usually can’t inform in simply an EP or single. [It’s] undoubtedly one for the very long time followers. It’s one thing I’m extremely happy with.”
A peek at Past The Veil‘s credit signifies that the album bears no collaborations outdoors of vocal options. Fellow producers GG Magree and Mija lend solely their toplines to the LP, which lays declare to a various forged of vocalists, together with Lights, Dia Frampton, JT Roach, So Under, Eli Teplin, and Vancouver Sleep Clinic. In sum, Past The Veil is an intimate, targeted exposition of Seven Lions, a pure and unadulterated imaginative and prescient of the artistry into which he’s grown over time. It’s value noting that a lot of the album’s energy derives not from Seven Lions’ must launch an album, however from his want to take action, the vantage level from which the very best, most genuine artwork is normally born. Stream Past The Veil under.
Featured picture: Dawndra Budd
Classes: Music