CHARLY BLISS announce new album 'Forever' and share lead single 'Nineteen'
New York pop savants Charly Bliss want their new album Forever, out August 16th on Lucky Number, to crush you under the weight of pure feeling. They want to sweep you up in a hurricane of heartbreak. The album’s powerful lead single 'Nineteen,' released today alongside a video directed by Henry Kaplan, does just that.
"I’ll always be fascinated by love and relationships that don’t quite work and bring tsunamis of heartbreak. The further away I am from it, the kind of love that bashes you against the rocks just as often as it carries you over waves of manic joy, the easier it is to see the full scope of it. First love is crazy," Eva Hendricks says of the song.
Forever, produced by Jake Luppen (Hippo Campus) and Caleb Wright (Samia) along with the band’s Sam Hendricks, is full of the band’s biggest, brightest power pop yet, but it’s an evolution, not a departure. Forever crams a lifetime of feeling, decades of friendship, and years of craft into a batch of sonically tight but emotionally vast songs that activate the pleasure centres in your brain whether you’re listening alone in your headphones or in a packed room at a live show. The songs shimmer and burst, the way fireworks look like they should sound.
Charly Bliss is Eva Hendricks, Sam Hendricks, Spencer Fox and Dan Shure.
Hear 'Nineteen' on streaming services here and watch the video for 'Nineteen' below.
When Charly Bliss sat down to write new music, they started with a simple directive: “It has to be fun.” When the writing process began in 2020, the world was in the midst of, among other things, a fun deficit, the kind of endorphin drought that only a new Charly Bliss record could remedy. “Fun is our natural state,” says guitarist Spencer Fox. “No one has more fun than us and no one loves each other more than us.” On the road, the quartet spends all their time together “giggling and being stupid.” Not surprising from a band made up of lifelong friends, including a pair of siblings. Eva describes the bond with her bandmates as “the biggest relationship of her life.”
Still, the rigorous experience of recording, releasing, and touring their second album, 2019’s Young Enough, left the band feeling creatively overcooked, the result of wanting everything about the record and shows to be perfect. It’s a feeling they were intent on shedding as they commenced work on their third LP. A pair of non-album singles ('I Need a New Boyfriend,' 'You Don’t Even Know Me Anymore') released last year had the band and their fans primed for a new full-length album.
While working on previous albums, Charly Bliss had done their songwriting in a room together. But the Forever writing sessions began with Eva halfway across the planet in Australia. Ironically, the remote writing process brought the bandmates closer than ever. With no deadlines to hit or tour dates on the books, Fox, Shure, and the two Hendrices (pluralized like “matrix”) took their time generating new songs. With no ticking clock, the band felt free to explore and experiment.
Eva recorded demos on her phone while sitting in a parked rental car. Several time zones away, Sam jotted down ideas in the middle of the night. Unsurprisingly, the record is suffused with a sense of sleeplessness. The jittery feeling of new love. The raw insomnia brought on by heartache. The late nights spent out (or in) with friends new and old. The full-body cringe of remembering who you used to be and learning how to love that person. You know, the kind of big feelings that make it hard to shut your brain off. Front to back, the album plays like a love letter to love letters. It was all made possible by the band giving itself space to breathe, for the individuals who make up Charly Bliss to grow together despite the distance between them.
Charly Bliss - Forever album tracklisting
1. Tragic
2. Calling You Out
3. Back There Now
4. Nineteen
5. In Your Bed
6. I’m Not Dead
7. How Do You Do It
8. I Don’t Know Anything
9. Here Comes The Darkness
10. Waiting For You
11. Easy To Love You
12. Last First Kiss
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