Experimental Danish indie collective New Kids release new album ‘Inger’

After the two advance singles ‘Antilife’ and ‘The World’, the Copenhagen experimental indie collective NEW KIDS release its new album ‘Inger’ today March 24th 2023. The eight songs on ‘Inger’ reveal an explorative and fragmentary pop music balancing form and improvisation equally. The record reflects life’s paradoxicality and multifaceted layers of meaning in both form, substance and thematics: Ambiguity in art, mistakes in music, honesty, anarchy, pain, love, and how all things are also multiple things.

Composer, drummer and main figure Rune Lohse states on the album release:

"This record is eclectic and between genres and there is a straight musical line from Alice Coltrane through R. Stevie Moore to Talking Heads. You will be dragged through a Bollywood movie, a free jazz club, a huge rock concert, an art installation, a conversation with your ancestors and end up wiser. This music is created to please. There is no intention of intellectualizing or doing something difficult. It is the best thing I have ever done."

NEW KIDS stems from songwriter and musician Rune Lohse, who has been a part of Danish impro music for the last decade while contributing to bands such as Tuhaf, Horse Orchestra and Klimaforandringer. Even though Lohse is NEW KIDS’s creative basis, the band is a collective of friends, which have been playing together in different contexts prior to the formation in 2016. The same year, the debut album ‘Leonida’ was released, in 2018 came ‘Collective Fruits’ and along the way, the band played a string of shows in Denmark.

NEW KIDS was formed from the wish to create relatable pop music implementing improvisation, mistakes and unpredictability. Lohse’s songs deliver a relatively simple form, which the musicians can interpret and fill with substance depending on their individual musicality. This vision materializes as an explorative, imaginative and imminent pop music which presents itself as both avant-garde and catchy.

NEW KIDS’ new album ‘Inger’ is recorded 2020-2022 in three different Copenhagen studios and came thus into being during Covid, which dictated a different process for the band than earlier. Where the recordings used to be just a part of the creative process, the studio work now played a bigger role than usual. The material was scrutinized and examined and along the way, almost a whole album was ditched, before the album at hand assumed its final shape.

The songs on ‘Inger’(a Danish name) were not only created during Covid, but also in the midst of a life crisis with separation and longing. The prevailing theme is distress and chaos, but is also contradictory and with an awareness of all things being more than one thing at once. Similar to the music in its fragmented appearance, the lyrics also seek to embrace life’s paradoxes, opposites and differing perspectives. Thus ‘Inger’ embodies plastic logics such as nature, love, pain, story telling - descriptions of and meditation on fields in which human life unfolds, for the individual, for everyone, in time and eternally and in concrete locations, everywhere

Listen to NEW KIDS’ new album ‘Inger’ HERE