New Zealand electronic voyageurs SoccerPractise return with the icy and melancholic “Younger Looking Skin,” the latest release from their forthcoming album, Te Pō, due for release October 18, 2019.
Bringing to mind the frozen isolation of New Zealand’s Deep South, new track “Younger Looking Skin” evokes the feeling of walking home alone on a winter’s night, a tightly wrapped coat the only protection from the biting air.
The song opens with a breathless choir sample and programmed hand-claps which echo with cold indifference before spilling into a deep bass line, garage guitars and a deeply personal lyric exploring the conflicted memories of childhood and loss, enveloped in a frozen choral chamber.
“Hanging pictures on the wall / I was witness to it all / the silence is dull photos are all we have left now”
Although the song brings to mind elements of bands such as The Chills, Joy Division and The Stone Roses, “Younger Looking Skin” remains suspended within SoccerPractise’s peculiar vision of genre-defying electronic music delivered with an off-kilter, human pulse.
The visual accompaniment, created by Wellington-based visual artist Erica Sklenars, features real footage of faceless students returning from a university toga party on a cold night in Dunedin, a southern New Zealand city with a large student population. Their faces buried in their phones, the subjects are seemingly oblivious to the cold, to the camera and to their fleeting presence on the landscape itself.
Visual artists Erica Skelnars and Dan Harris are working exclusively with SoccerPractise on ‘Te Pō’ and will provide an accompaniment for each song on the album.
SoccerPractise’s new album – Te Pō (The night, darkness or underworld) is a collection of sonic dreams, visual nightmares and fragmented hallucinations set deep in the night of a strangely familiar yet unknown city.
Auckland, NZ genre misfits SoccerPractise formed in 2014, gaining a cult following with their electrifying, original musical presence and skewed artistic sensibility, supporting the likes of Underworld, Aldous Harding, and more along the way. SoccerPractise’s second album ‘Te Pō’ is out October 18, 2019.