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Autre Monde Share Single Ahead of Album Release

February 17, 2020

Autre Monde have shared new single ‘Brain Upon Your Pillow’, available now.

On the creation of the track, songwriter and bassist Padraig Cooney explains:

“I wrote ‘Brain Upon Your Pillow’ as a kind of Latin-y folk ballad, all finger picked guitar. It was written in the midst of Autre Monde really finding its feet, understanding what we were as a band, and it was just natural that it would become this groove thing with a hint of desperation and drama. That Grace Jones ‘Pull Up To The Bumper’ beat, we’d be happy to play it for hours, so the song stretches out on it a bit before taking its other turns.

It’s a paranoid song, it’s about not sleeping and the threats that torment the character at night. I always picture them as some kind of huckster made good for whom the con is over. It’s Uncut Gems!”

‘Brain Upon Your Pillow’ is the third single taken from ‘The Imaginary Museum’, the upcoming debut album by Dublin’s Autre Monde, to be released Feb 28th via Strange Brew Records (Junior Brother, Squarehead, Daithi). Following 2019’s acclaimed one-two of ‘Fever In May’ (“impossible to resist” – Red Bull Best Irish Songs of 2019) and ‘On the Record’ (“a bright delight of a song” – Nialler9 Best Irish Songs of 2019), ‘Brain Upon Your Pillow’ imposes a menacing and paranoid groove, as dark as anything in the band’s early catalogue but leavened by agreeable harmonies throughout and dramatic synth figures to close. 

Autre Monde are Paddy Hanna (vocals), Padraig Cooney (bass, synth, vocals), Mark Chester (guitar) and Eoghan O’Brien (drums, synth, backing vocals). Three of them are from Dublin and Mark is from Cumbria. They met through their involvement together in a network of bands that at one stage or another were central to the Popical Island collective (Skelocrats, Grand Pocket Orchestra, Ginnels, No Monster Club).

Elsewhere, the record stretches out confidently: luxuriating in baths of vintage synthesizers on ‘The Operator’, descending into something wild and uncertain in the final minutes of ‘Brain Upon Your Pillow’, mixing the pastoral with the robotic on ‘Balls of Your Suit’ and ‘Three Mandolins’. ‘Truly Glowing’ is a euphoric finale.

The album title is taken from a line in Fredric Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Captialism’ where he writes: “in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum”.

Autre Monde – ‘The Imaginary Museum’ – out February 28th on Strange Brew Records.

Tracklist

1. Lesser Than You
2. On The Record
3. Brain Upon Your Pillow
4. Balls Of Your Suit
5. Three Mandolins
6. Fever In May
7. Saturday
8. The Operator
9. Truly Glowing

 Autre Monde live

March 19th – SXSW / Austin, Texas The Velveeta Room (presented by Music From Ireland)

Strange Brew
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