Gloria de Oliveira
- bizzarre
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Gloria de Oliveira shares new single and video "The Wind Took it Away" taken from her new album 'The Lying Swans' via La Double Vie & Cargo Records.
Following the announcement of her upcoming album The Lying Swans, out Oct 30th via La Double Vie & Cargo Records, today Gloria de Oliveira returns with new single "The Wind Took it Away", a wistful chamber pop meditation on the aftermath of love, which follows on from the atmospheric first single "Fading Faces".
Tracing the fading remains of a relationship, the song is carried by intricate Bossa Nova percussion underneath a lush arrangement, infusing the song with a playful lightness despite its deep melancholy. The German-Brazilian artist’s sweetly intimate vocal performance and lyrics suggest acceptance, finding grace in what can no longer be held onto:
“I wrote most of the album and recorded the demo to this song during a sweltering pandemic summer in the flat I’d just moved into after finally being able to escape an abusive situation.
I spent sleepless nights listening to Nara Leão, Milton Nascimento and Baden Powell and watching ‘Thorn Birds’, ‘L'histoire d'Adèle H’ and ‘Days of Heaven’.
When I later sent Randall these references he immediately understood how to flesh out this world.”
Produced by Randall Dunn (Anna von Hausswolff, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Marissa Nadler), the recording features de Oliveira on vocals, grand piano, Wurlitzer and synthesizer, joined by an exceptional cast of musicians, including drummer Matt Chamberlain (Fiona Apple, David Bowie, Tori Amos, Pearl Jam), harpist Marilu Donovan (LEYA, Eartheater), flautist Lina Andonovska, pedal-steel player Luke Bergman and guitarist Lennard Zander.
While The Lying Swans explores the long shadow of trauma and betrayal, "The Wind Took it Away" approaches these themes with surprising warmth, revealing another facet of de Oliveira's forthcoming album, where beauty emerges in spite of loss.
Drawing inspiration from poetry, literature, film and visual art as much as music, de Oliveira and Dunn crafted an album that moves effortlessly between the spectral and the pastoral, where echoes of Fantasy and Giallo film scores, ancient folk traditions and the rhythmic tenderness of Bossa Nova, MPB and Tropicália converge.
The lyrics likewise weave together mythology with allusions to Milton's Paradise Lost and the poetry of John Keats, Emily Brontë and Anne Sexton. The Lying Swans seeks beauty amid darkness, embracing a proto-Gothic sensibility rooted as much in German Romanticism as in horror cinema, where love, obsession, and illusion become almost mythical.
The Lying Swans thus unravels as a deeply personal story of trauma and its aftermath, referencing the Greek myth of Leda, wherein Zeus tries to charm a Spartan princess by disguising himself as a swan. As with all myths, this one can be looked at in different ways, as a tale of magical seduction, or an account of a of brutal violation. Leda’s consent has remained a topic of debate for centuries.
The album traces the fractured sense of identity left in betrayal's wake, the fragile process of falling in love again, and the slow return of trust. Many of the songs revolve around acts of recognition: learning to distinguish truth from illusion, reading signs, seeing clearly, and trusting one's own perception again after years of doubt.
The successor to “Oceans of Time” (Sacred Bones, 2022), her collaboration with David Lynch’s longtime sound designer Dean Hurley, “The Lying Swans” leads de Oliveira into new territories. Thematically as well as sonically, on these 9 songs the German-Brazilian artist seems to be stepping out of the misty realms of reverb and gauzy fuzz, displaying an earthier, more tactile and thereby vulnerable side. Still, they inhabit the very space where de Oliveira's emotionally resonant songwriting naturally thrives, magnified by Dunn’s instinct for dense atmosphere, hovering between dream and reality, concealment and revelation. Her seraphic, yearning voice remains the focal point, flanked by a stunning cast of musicians indebted as much to de Oliveira’s Brazilian roots as to 1970s & 1980s Giallo soundtracks, the atmospheric Italian horror mysteries that contain both stylized graphic violence and voyeurism, and splendid beauty.
The haunting tale of The Lying Swans unfolds like a work of Magic Realism, inhabited by birds, saints, sirens, bloody faces, ghost ships and spectral apparitions, inviting listeners into Gloria de Oliveira’s most immediate and complex work to date
Photo by Mona Najma
.Pre-order album here
