City Calm Down Announce New Album Details

I OH YOU are thrilled to announce the release of the highly anticipated second album from Melbourne four-piece City Calm Down – Echoes In Blue – due for release on April 6, 2018 on vinyl, CD, and digital formats. To celebrate the news, today the band also debuted new single Joan, I’m Disappearing – the album’s evocative opening track, available to stream and download now.

Echoes In Blue is the follow-up to City Calm Down’s highly acclaimed 2015 debut In A Restless House, and sees them reunite with producer Malcolm Besley in the studio for a second time.

City Calm Down are currently on the road with Laneway Festival, and today also revealed an upcoming UK/European tour for May 2018.

Jack Bourke (vocals), Sam Mullaly (synths/keys), Jeremy Sonnenberg (bass) and Lee Armstrong (drums) have consolidated strengths and stretched their horizons. Right from the first scene-setting moments of Joan… and tracks In This Modern Land, Blood and Blame, Bourke’s meticulous vocal delivery is more grounded and assured than ever, the band’s moody, synth-laced rock following suit. Of the new single, Bourke says, “‘Joan…’ is about coming to terms with the dissolution of a long-term relationship and how neglect ultimately led to its breakdown.”

Anchoring the album’s epic pop drive is the band’s accomplished song writing, which catalogues the mounting anxieties of our age with an unflinching eye. As more of our daily life becomes pressurised to meet endless round-the-clock demands, City Calm Down meditate on what’s being lost in that transaction – and why it matters.

“Echoes In Blue is not concerned with answering questions as much as it is with asking them. It is interested in the reality of being spread too thin, of being unable to shut out the noise, where we’re told to buy a house, with a mountain of debt, and do what we love, to be passionate and driven, whilst also making enough time for our wife or husband, boyfriend or girlfriend, for our children, parents and friends. Has life has ever been more exciting or more artificial? Why are we so connected yet feel so alone? Perhaps, in all this excitement, we forget to be bored and examine ourselves a little more closely. Or maybe we should just embrace the rage.” – City Calm Down

City Calm Down recorded Echoes In Blue in two 10-day stretches in February, at Northcote’s Soundpark Studios and Collingwood’s Rolling Stock Recording Rooms, before finishing over the six months at home and Richmond’s Bakehouse Studios.

“We wanted to start opening new doors,” says Bourke, “but we weren’t really thinking about what might follow. We were conscious of not repeating ourselves, while also wanting to keep some of the things we really liked about the first record: aspects of the sound palette and emotion.”

In A Restless House spawned singles Son, Rabbit Run, Wandering, Your Fix and Border On Control, earning over six million streams on Spotify, a Feature Album on triple j, plus spins on Beats 1, FBi Radio, Triple R, and 4ZZZ, coverage from NME, Stereogum, Consequence Of Sound, Indie Shuffle, and Clash, multiple sold-out Australian tours, sets at Falls, Splendour, Sugar Mountain, Yours & Owls and more.

Echoes In Blue tracklist:
Joan, I’m Disappearing
In This Modern Land
Distraction/Losing Sleep
Blame
April ’18
Decision Fatigue
Kingdom
Blood
I Heard Nothing From You
Amber
Pride
Echoes In Blue

Echoes In Blue Album
City Calm Down
Out Friday 6 April through I OH YOU
Pre-order available here