Black Light White Light new album due 23 March 2018

Album release: 'Horizons' by Black Light White Light
Release date: 23 March 2018
Label: Forward Backwards Recordings
More info: Band website

Black Light White Light have shared the first single 'Teenage Dream' from their forthcoming new album 'Horizons'. Listen to 'Teenage Dream' on SoundCloud HERE.

Mining the rich territories of The Velvet Underground and the 90’s Madchester movement, and combining with the sound of classic 4AD, the Danish / Swedish troupe Black Light White Light shine a light into dark corners often left alone in contemporary psychedelic indie-rock. Based in Malmo, Sweden the musical project is centred on the Danish singer, guitarist and songwriter Martin Ejlertsen.

The creation of the band’s third album Horizons began in early 2015, with Ejlertsen taking stock of their catalogue to date, and looking for a new vantage point from which to approach his music. With a desire to make a dark pop record with razor-sharp rock songs, new material slowly began to unfold in a basement studio, deep underground in Copenhagen, where the band twisted their ideas and sketches in co-operation with a new drummer, Viktor Höber, and producer/ engineer and fellow musician Christian Ki.

Citing film as a huge influence on his music – in particular the works of David Lynch and Danish film maker Nicolas Winding Refn – Ejlertsen began to experiment in coupling Lynch-ian concepts of duality, visions, and dream states, with the bloody self-destruction and gallows humour that pervades Refn’s work. With one eye on the Factory Records era, 'Horizons' introduces undulating keyboards as a new and fundamental element of the sound, making the songs breezy yet intrusive, with harmonies and chiming delay guitars under attack with fuzz, all enveloped in dark and pervasive melancholic melodies.

“I like the idea that the music develops. That the music twist and turn in new directions. Being now a father of two small children the album is certainly assuming new characters and reflecting new faces and shadows of who I am as a human being today as someone just that bit different from who I was when I made the previous albums”, Martin Ejlertsen says.

On the new recordings Black Light White Light present an album full of memorable pop songs all twisted up with moody darkness and Ejlertsen’s poetic longings. He continues; “This is even to an extent that I along the way considered if this album should be released under a new moniker. Cause the band is more a solo project than it has been before. But then again, I came to conclusion why really? This band project has always really been about my songs and twisted thoughts coming to life. This album is really that aspect but just further developed into new territories.”

‘Horizons’ is mastered by Joe Lambert (Deerhunter, Animal Collective, The National) while the album artwork is realized by Pete Manley/Made Four (Oasis, Polly Paulusma, Madonna).

Press reaction to date

"Imperious shoegaze set against swirling psychedelia, the project fuses the adventurous spirit of the 60s with the fiercely independent endeavours of the 80s." - CLASH