Danishrock ensemble Tyrants & Kings shares solemn second single from new album ‘Sketches For A Requiem’

After a ten-year hiatus, the Danish rock ensemble TYRANTS & KINGS emerges from the shadows and into the dark on their new album 'Sketches For A Requiem', set for a May 31st release through Engine Room Records. It's an album with a new minimalist approach to production and songwriting, cutting to the core in its personal tales of life and death.

This past April saw the release of TYRANTS & KINGS’s first new music in a decade with the simultaneously bleak and beautiful opener ‘End of An Endless Day’. Today, the band shares the second single with the solemn cry of the track ‘My World Is Burning’, about which singer and songwriter Dennis Kasten states:

"’My World Is Burning’ is about the feeling of having forgotten what one is fighting for. That one has surrendered and silently follows the current.”

TYRANTS & KINGS will release 'Sketches For A Requiem' on vinyl and digital formats through their newly established imprint Engine Room Records. The vinyl version can now be pre-ordered HERE, while digital formats can be pre-saved HERE. The band will celebrate the new record with a free release show at Nordsø Records in Copenhagen on June 1st. And stream the single HERE

TYRANTS & KINGS have been on a significant artistic journey since 2008, where they rose from the ashes of the rock band The Royal Highness with singer and songwriter Dennis Kasten as the band's creative driving force. Since then, TYRANTS & KINGS have released three albums 'Tyrants & Kings' (2009), 'Phosphor Anthems' (2011), and most recently 'RunMarchBurn' (2014), while establishing themselves as a present and rawly swinging live orchestra.

Following the three initial albums, where the hard, guitar-based rock sound dominated, there arose a need within the band to trim all unnecessary musical fat and let the vocals and songs take center stage. After some time of experimenting, the skeleton of a new type of songs emerged; Naked, smoldering and gritty, with melodies that feel both familiar and new, and with a structure and dynamic that constantly moves and lives its own special life.

TYRANTS & KINGS decided to follow this path and create a record with no limit to ambition or emotional scope, and filled with presence, personality and honesty, telling stories, creating images and conveying emotions. The band built their own studio, and the new material underwent many transformations and versions in form and style through a long process, which, however, always maintained its focus on vocals, songwriting, stories and the people behind.

After ten years of work, TYRANTS & KINGS can now finally share the nine songs that comprise the new album 'Sketches For A Requiem'. With respect for masters like Cave, Dylan and Cohen, the band grapples with the challenges of existence in an equally beautiful and bruised twilight rock music, where personal lyrics and intense melody are etched into the surface of dirty soundscapes, instrumentation and arrangements. It rattles, rumbles, and roars, but above all, it lives and breathes.

The title 'Sketches For A Requiem' denotes both the process of creating the songs, which TYRANTS & KINGS still considers to be in continuous change, and the subject matter of the songwriting: It is a requiem, written by a human halfway through life, wandering through a dystopian landscape with an ever-clearer view of the end approaching slowly on the horizon. The songs are personal, but are more of a reflection on the universal conditions that eternal change and, ultimately, death constitute.