Binnen een dikke maand komt het nieuwe album, Dark & Beautiful Secrets, van de Zweedse Normandie uit. In afwachting van deze release droppen de jongens nog een nieuw liedje van dit album: Babylon. Eind dit jaar staat ook een Europese tour gepland, maar of deze zal doorgaan is nog maar de vraag natuurlijk. Een stop in België zit er helaas niet tussen, maar wie wil kan in oktober hopelijk afzakken naar Nederland!
"'Babylon' wasn’t supposed to happen" says singer Philip Strand. "With the covid restrictions, it landed us more time to dive into the studio again and play around with new ideas. The song came purely from just having fun and playing around using breaths and coughs as instruments. I’ve been searching for my identity my entire life. Going from group to group, crowd to crowd, trying to fit in - finally, I realised that my true identity is something I should form myself”.“Are you following or falling out” is a line I wanted to use to express the way many of these groups behave. You’re either in or out. To me, identity is what you get when you mix all the things you identify with, bits and pieces that then become you as whole".
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Philip writes with unflinching candour about everything from panic attacks (Hostage) to his fractious relationship with the internet (Atmosphere), and how the need to dig deeper into yourself can make you lose track of reality (Babylon). He writes about love and lust, and how confusing the two can lead to learning harsh lessons about your personal worth (Chemicals). He examines who he was as a child and how much his life and his values have changed in adulthood (Mission Control). Underpinning all of these personal revelations, however, is the moment his life changed forever, aged 14, when he turned his back on the church he grew up in (Holy Water, Bury Me Alive, Renegade).
Though its rooted in the private rites of passage that helped shape Philip as a person, the potency of "Dark & Beautiful Secrets" lies in that unifying thread about finding the strength and courage to make your own stand in life, and to seek out that which is true for you. It’s about being brave about the person you once were and reconciling that with who you want to be.
