‘Disco’ video link: https://youtu.be/B53P9QFWfk4
‘Disco’ audio link: https://soundcloud.com/firerecords/modern-studies-disco
Summer Live Dates
25 May: Happiness Hotel, Leith, UK
27 May: Café Kino, Bristol, UK
28 May: The Lexington, London, UK
29 May: Mediterranéa, Stirling, UK
30 May: Blue Lamp, Aberdeen, Scotland
31 May: Glad Café, Glasgow, Scotland
01 June: Mackintosh Church, Glasgow, Scotland w/ The Pastels
23 Jun: Rip It Up Festival, Summerhall, Edinburgh, UK
“Disco was filmed by Mario Cruzado, using the iconic Bernat Klein studio building in Selkirk designed by Peter Womersley. Later, animation was added by Cameron Duguid, playing with elements found in the studio’s late Modernist architecture and its decaying carapace. The building is in decline, with rust and lime-soaked puddles, algae and mould, warped windows and fallen leaves. Everything appears in stark contrast because of the the snow, which serves to highlight the play of horizontal and vertical lines, the occasional shock of unnatural colour, and the deteriorating surfaces in glass, wood-grained concrete, steel and brick. The film acts as a romantic homage to this beautiful building, where the architecture is the main character, with a glimpse of the band as they shift round it, barely there, as shadows or ghosts.” – Emily Scott
★★★★ Mojo
★★★★ Uncut
★★★★ Record Collector
“Songs that see the mystical beyond the material” MOJO
‘Welcome Strangers’ is the second record by feral pop outliers Modern Studies. Elegiac and haunted, life-giving and triumphant, this beguiling return digs deep into landscapes both real and imagined, internal and external, in a work that might perhaps best be described as “kosmiche choral” or, if we’re pushing it “arts-und-crafts-werk”. Or, put simply, glorious pop music.
It is an elemental and often spectral world of contrasting tones and hues that is found within ‘Welcome Strangers’, one whose lyrical vocabulary is of loss, light, air, sun, growth; of spires, seeds and phosphene dreams. Here is the Britain of visionaries such as Kate Bush, Broadcast or PJ Harvey, a nation of dark magic, conflict, celebration and confusion, all at the same time.
Now they proudly present ‘Welcome Strangers’, an album of modernist pop weirdness for the 21st century, a bricolage where classicism meets experimentalism and repeated listening unearths new stories for this contemporary age. More elaborate and expansive than its predecessor, this is music as cartography, Modern Studies mapping their own multi-dimensional internal world.
‘Welcome Strangers’. Welcome all.
Ben Myers, February 2018
Tracklist
1. Get Back Down
2. Disco
3. Mud and Flame
4. Let Idle Hands
5. It’s Winter
6. Young Sun
7. Horns and Trumpets
8. Fast As Flows
9. The House
10. Phosphene Dream
Pre-order link: