photo credit: El Hardwick
by Dan Goldin (@paintingwithdan)
Eight years after the project’s debut, Elena Tonra (Daughter) is returning to her solo project Ex:Re, embracing a world of late night art pop and shadow-lit alternative rock. Save As feels monumental, a gorgeous album that pulls out all the stops yet retains a subtle resolve and minimalist sensibility. Trading the folk spirit of her work in Daughter for a sound that’s both mesmerizing and amorphous, Tonra is shifting in a way that feels much like a dream, pulling between surrealist ideas and layered loops that reside just beneath the surface. At the heart of the songs are her vocals, warm and melodic, lifted with smoke-filled harmonies, as the textures move between sparse immediacy and echoed sentiment.
While “Radio Station” (one of our favorite songs of September) introduced the record with a dirge of art pop bliss built amid disorienting acoustic guitars and a spiraling hook, “Sleep” peels things back, opting for a change in landscape. Taking a reflective approach to the writing, Tonra is reliving time in passing moments, captured brilliantly in the song’s lyrics and the composition. Written during a stay in a Paris hotel, the demo of the song worked its way into the studio recording, a layer in the majestic make-up of “Sleep” pulled from the sketches of guitars recorded through vocoder. With an electronic pulse of drum machines and processed progressions that sound as dreamy as they do alien, Ex:Re feels at ease, comfortable in the programed haze.
Check out both the single and a live in-studio performance filmed at 4AD’s London studio.