Danish brothers Communions share latest track ‘Cupid’ taken from upcoming album ‘Pure Fabrication’
Danish brothers Communions reveal latest track ‘Cupid’, a feel-good indie cut embracing the naivety of love. The track follows their recent announcement of their sophomore album Pure Fabrication. This album marks their first full release since joining forces with respected Copenhagen indie and hometown label Tambourhinoceros (School of X, Palace Winter, Pardans), and will be out on April 23rd .
‘Cupid’ follows on the heels of singles ‘Bird of Passage’ and ‘Splendour’, 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.
Pure Fabrication sees the band tackle themes of change, instability, freedom, love and identity - all through the lens of a fictional protagonist. Where the album’s opener, ‘Bird of Passage’, introduced these themes, and ‘Splendour’ showed us the band’s take on destructive love, ‘Cupid’ is a more innocent take on the theme which reflects where the story begins. A feel-good indie rock track, ‘Cupid’ is reminiscent of the band’s early output, which garnered high praise from Pitchfork and KEXP and more.
Lead singer and guitarist Martin Rehof elaborates:
“The album’s preoccupation with change and instability, a red thread that’s established on ‘Bird Of Passage’, is mirrored in the progression of the songs themselves, as themes shapeshift and take on new points of departure from one story to the next.
For instance, the romantic notion of love on ‘Cupid’ morphs into a skewed, addictive and possessive kind of love on ‘Splendour’.”
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,