Whispering Sons announce third album 'The Great Calm' | LIVE update

Belgian five-piece Whispering Sons announce their new album The Great Calm, out on February 23, 2024 via [PIAS] Recordings. Today they share the brooding Cold City, another tastemaker for the new album and something completely different from the almost joyous first single The Talker.

Cold City is as icy as its title suggests. Describing a desire so unattainable, it feels like a nostalgic song, albeit a nostalgia for something that doesn’t even exist yet. “We settled on the form pretty quickly”, singer Fenne Kuppens explains, “the real challenge was to find the right sounds to carry the feeing of the song.” By layering synth upon synth and adding lots of texture, Whispering Sons created a song that’s small and fragile, but very rich in atmosphere.

The video for Cold City is another chapter of the short film ‘Balm (After Violence)’ which saw its premiere at the Film Fest Ghent and at Left Of The Dial in Rotterdam with a special screening and live performance.

Watch the music video here: youtu.be/SNhpmVJMAas

Listen to Cold City here: whisperingsons.ffm.to/coldcity

Following the dark, expansive power of 2018’s Image and 2021’s minimal Several Others, Whispering Sons’ third album The Great Calm represents a reimagining and rethinking, though this growth has produced a series of songs that are still defiantly and uniquely true to the group.

To start with Whispering Sons are a five-piece once again. Original drummer Sander Pelsmaekers had to drop out of playing music after suffering nerve damage (and even took the role of the group's tour manager in the interim) but is now able to return on synths. Bassist Tuur Vandeborne has moved over to the drum stool, while the band’s long-term engineer — an experienced producer in his own right — Bert Vliegen has joined on bass. Guitarist and songwriter Kobe Lijnen and vocalist and lyricist Fenne Kuppens retain their roles, but they too have adapted and evolved their approaches for The Great Calm.

Yet while this might all seem like upheaval from the outside, for the band these changing currents have in fact led them to an artistic place that feels comfortably their own.