Danish brothers Communions share latest track and video ‘Bird of Passage’ and announce their forthcoming record Pure Fabrication via Tambourhinoceros.
Danish brothers Communions reveal their latest track and video ‘Bird of Passage’, and announce their forthcoming record Pure Fabrication, their first full release since joining forces with respected Copenhagen indie and hometown label Tambourhinoceros (School of X, Palace Winter, Pardans).
The news follows on the heels of 'Splendour’, the first single from the record, which ushered in a new era for the band as they moved from a four-piece to focus solely on the creative partnership between founders and brothers Mads and Martin Rehof.
Through shimmering, grand guitar hooks and emotional vocals, ‘Bird of Passage’ sets the tone for the coming record, reflecting on the ways in which personal identity is shaped by larger forces.
““Bird of Passage” works like the chorus for the entire record.”
reflects lead singer Martin Rehof,
“It centers around the idea that people constantly transform and reinterpret the past in new ways by constructing narratives around themselves. It's about the kind of identity crisis that emerges as a natural consequence of life’s variability; of the fact that one’s self is constantly changing, never the same from one day to the next.”
The accompanying video, which includes some footage from the band’s childhood, tries to capture this visually by showing Mads walking through an endless series of doors, with no way of turning back.
“The concept of the video is about moving through different phases of life. In the video, like the song, memory plays a role. The video utilizes a split screen, highlighting the theme of a split identity; Mads and Martin are split up by the screen, but ultimately together in their childhood memories.”
The track also sees Martin reflect on his own identity-crisis, inspired by his experience of moving from Denmark to the United States and back again during his formative years.
Born in Denmark, Communions’ Rehof brothers moved to the US and lived for 11 years in the suburban outskirts of Seattle before moving back to Copenhagen in their teens. Whilst the experience fed into their sonic-identity and saw the brothers absorbing influence from the hardcore-punk music and skate communities, it also left them with the residue of culture-shock, and a sense of being in-between “The refrain “I make my kingdom everywhere” is not an empowering line, but rather an ironic one that attempts to gauge the paradox of being everywhere and nowhere at once”.
But in a sea of transforming culture, what is an individual identity? This is one of the questions which Communions grapple with on Pure Fabrication, a 15 song, hour-long odyssey into self-understanding, it's described as a “parody of a coming of age story”. Following the journey of a fictional protagonist, the record culminates in the eventual understanding that we’re not always as free as we would like to think - bound by culture and the forces that have shaped us.
“As the album progresses, strong ironic overtones in whatever praise of freedom was besung are slowly unveiled,”
the band shares.
“While the opening songs represent a character with an—perhaps naive—assertiveness and unwillingness to be restrained or suppressed by the ways of the world, by the end of the record, the protagonist questions the entire notion of desire and freedom.”
After returning to Denmark, Mads and Martin attended the progressive Christianshavn High School and quickly became part of the burgeoning Mayhem scene (an alternative-punk scene in Copenhagen, based out of the infamous venue / practice room).
Whilst the band’s style was recognized as a cut from the same post-punk cloth as many of their fellow Mayhem bands (i.e. Iceage, Pardans, Vår, and Lower), Communions stood out by embracing melody and pop songwriting, two elements that Mayhem’s noise and harsh punk-rock bands tended to abandon. Where their first EP Cobblestones, (released whilst still in high school) drew inspiration from the underground scene’s punk cynicism, the band steadily refined their craft across two following EPs and debut album Blue (2017), riding a wave of international attention and festival performances.
Marked by sharp cultural criticism, self reflection, and artistic commentary of a grand scale, Communions’ new music takes the signature indie rock from the dark clubs of their youth and merges it with full-fleshed cerebral critique and symbolism.
A treatise on cultural inheritance and self-discovery, Pure Fabrication arrives as Communions’ most cohesive output to date. Martin reflects,
“It’s a more mature realization of all of the experiments we have made, an album that, in my view, incorporates all of our best sides from each previous release.”
Pre-order Pure Fabrication here