Tag: Cut Copy Lights & Music

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Initially starting as a bedroom, solo recording project of its Melbourne, Australia-based founding member and frontman Dan Whitfield and expanding into a full-fledge band with Tim Hoey (guitar), Mitchell Scott (drums) and Ben Browning (bass), the acclaimed indie electro pop act Cut Copy have been one of their homeland’s most successful and well-regarded acts over their nearly 20 years together. 2008’s In Ghost Colours, which featured standout singles “Lights & Music” and “Hearts on Fire,” received nominations for ARIA’s Best Dance/Electronic Album and Album of the Year at the J Awards. 2011’s Zonoscope topped the ARIA charts, was nominated for a Best Dance/Electronic Album at that year’s Grammy Awards and won a Best Dance Release ARIA Award. Adding to an enormous, internationally known profile, the members of Cut Copy have gone on a number of successful national and international tours, and have made appearances on the late night TV circuit, including stops on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Cut Copy’s sixth full-length album Freeze, Melt is slated for an August 21, 2020 release through Cutters Records/The Orchard — and the album reportedly finds the band expanding and refining the sound that has won them national and international acclaim. Written during an especially cold European winter, the album sees the band pulling the emotional leanings of their work into the foreground with the material thematically exploring love in strange and perilous times.

So far two singles have been released off the album, “Cold Water” and the slow-burning, intimate and atmospheric “Love Is All We Share,” which I wrote about earlier this year. Melt, Freeze‘s third and latest single, “Like Breaking Glass” may arguably be the most dance floor friendly single. Centered around shimmering synth arpeggios, stuttering beats, a soaring hook, some subtle industrial clang and clatter, and Whitfield’s plaintive vocals, “Like Breaking Glass” is a bit of a return to form for the Aussie act, as it sounds as though it could have possibly been part of the In Ghost Colours sessions. But at its core, the song is emotionally ambivalent, evoking the confecting emotions of a relationship on the verge of a breakup — especially

Dan Whitford says of the single: “In the beginning ‘Like Breaking Glass’ started out as a completely different track. Before one weekend I was mucking around in the studio with just a drum beat and an acid bassline. I never managed to finish it, but when I came back to it the next week there was something about that beat that felt compelling, so I started writing a song over the top of it. It is about the conflicted feelings of a relationship that has begun to unravel. Where sometimes against all logic, you discover that affections run deep just as a break up becomes inevitable. It was also one of my favourite songs working in the studio with the band when we crafted the middle section of the song comprising of weird delay effects, off-beat drum hits and metallic clangs where Mitchell was throwing a box of metal objects around the room, and we stood there recording him.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Cut Copy Releases a Meditative Visual for Slow-burning New Single “Love Is All We Share”

Initially starting as a bedroom, solo recording project of its Melbourne, Australia-based founding member and frontman Dan Whitfield and expanding into a full-fledge band with Tim Hoey (guitar), Mitchell Scott (drums) and Ben Browning (bass), the acclaimed indie electro pop act Cut Copy have been one of their homeland’s most successful and well-regarded acts over their nearly 20 years together. 2008’s In Ghost Colours, which featured standout singles “Lights & Music” and “Hearts on Fire,” received nominations for ARIA’s Best Dance/Electronic Album and Album of the Year at the J Awards. 2011’s Zonoscope topped the ARIA charts, was nominated for a Best Dance/Electronic Album at that year’s Grammy Awards and won a Best Dance Release ARIA Award. Adding to an enormous, internationally known profile, the members of Cut Copy have gone on a number of successful national and international tours, and have made appearances on the late night TV circuit, including stops on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live!

2017’s Haiku From Zero was released to international critical applause and was named a Double J Feature Album. But interestingly enough, “Love Is All We Share,” the acclaimed Aussie act’s latest single is the first batch of new material from the band in three years. and the single is a decided departure from the thumping, club anthems that have won them attention internationally. The song is a slow-burning, intimate, and atmospheric track, centered around a sparse arrangement featuring gentle layers of shimmering synths, Dan Whitfield’s plaintive vocals and shuffling beats. Evoking the euphoric highs of love, our seemingly insatiable desire for connection and physical touch, the song finds Cut Copy crafting a Quiet Storm-inspired take on synth pop that’s eerie and timely. Certainly, in a world in which even being near your friends and loved ones takes on a heightened significance and risk, love in all forms takes on a completely different meaning. 

“’Love Is All We Share’ is a song we made using only a handful of sounds, hoping to create an intimate and unworldly atmosphere,” Cut Copy’s dan Whitfield says in press notes “It was written a year ago about the anxieties of imagined future times, as technology becomes more all-consuming. But in light of recent events the song took on an eerie significance. Now, with our immediate future uncertain and people the world over self isolating, ‘love’ more than ever, feels like one of the best things we can share.”

Directed by American contemporary artist Takeshi Murata, the recently released video for “Love Is All We Share” communicates the track’s themes through his work in hyper-realism and computer-simulated imagery. The end result is a mesmerizing and hypnotic visual of interconnected digital, floating bubbles. “Of the ideas we had, the floating bubbles stood out – representing elements of the song best with animation that’s meditative,” Murata says. “For me, the bubbles point to our relationships and their fragility, relevant to the lyrics and time.”