Megacorporations owning our governments, the world on the verge of ecological collapse – is this 2019?
When Philip K. Dick wrote what would later become Blade Runner set in 2019, no one would have believed that the dystopian cyberpunk future he imagined would be so similar to the world we live in today…
This realisation is what sparked the idea for the new album from FOREVER STILL – ‘Breathe In Colours’Forever, which will be released via Nuclear Blast on March 29th.
With their sophomore full-length album, the band has evolved their songwriting skills even further and didn’t want to produce a plain copy of its predecessor »Tied Down«, released in 2016. Instead, the new album drifts both into more epic moments like on the captivating opener ‘Rewind’ or ‘Embrace The Tide’, while frontwoman Maja Shining also delivers her heaviest screams to date on the groovy ‘Survive’ or their emotional declaration of war, ‘Fight!’. And for the first time, the songwriter duo of singer Maja and multi-instrumentalist Mikkel Haastrup has decided to make the album a more collaborative effort and therefore brought their long time live drummer, Rune Frisch, into the studio with them to record the drums – a big step for the two young musicians who handled everything on their own on the previous record, from music videos to band photos, the album production and even concert booking.
Maja‘s lyrics are still as personal as they used to be, however for ‘Breathe In Colours’, the band decided to work with a futuristic and dystopian theme, as she explains: “Instead of looking in, we turned our focus to the world and saw it in a state of change. It somehow reminded us of the dystopian cyberpunk future, we’d seen in books and movies when we were kids, where megacorporations own our governments, the world is on the verge of ecological collapse and humanity is fleeing into cyberspace building walls around themselves and closing their eyes to the horrors of the real world. This, and the fact that two of the most influential cyberpunk works of all time, Blade Runner and Akira, are set in 2019, is what gave us the initial idea for the album and its more electronic and raw sound.”
On their social media, FOREVER STILL have already revealed some initial info on the new album hidden in binary code language, and the explanation behind the cover artwork of »Breathe In Colours« – still designed by Maja herself – is just as fascinating:
“At first glance the cover art appears quite dark and gloomy, but in reality it’s bursting with colour. Just like the real world – sometimes we just have to look really closely to actually see it. The many numbers behind me represent all the colours in the world in binary code – more commonly known as ‘computer language’ and is at the same time a reference to the world becoming so digital and people escaping into their computers to find colours instead of living in the real world and finding them there.”
Danish modern rock outfit unveils its first music video off the new album. Watch ‘Rewind!
The ‘Breathe In Colours’ tracklist reads as follows:
01. Rewind
02. Fight!
03. Breathe In Colours
04. Is It Gone?
05. Survive
06. Do Your Worst
07. Pieces
08. Rising Over You
09. Say Your Goodbyes
10. Embrace The Tide
Bonus:
11. Is It Gone? (Acoustic Version)
12. Perfect Day