David Allred shares double single

‘Oh Lauren’ / ‘Good Afternoon’

Stream / share 'Oh Lauren'

Stream / share 'Good Afternoon'

New album The Beautiful World arrives January 24 on Erased Tapes

“In Allred, we have a new master of minimalism.”
Loud & Quiet

“...crystalline reverberations and finely balanced symphonic/sparse dimensions.”
★★★★ MOJO

“Part orchestral, part experimental - all wonderful.”
Electronic Sound

Ahead of the release of his new album The Beautiful World on January 24th, today David Allred shares two new singles. The heartbreaking ‘Oh Lauren’ is a song written in dedication to one of Allred’s childhood best friends who tragically took her own life at the age of 11 years old. On the impact of her death, Allred says, “Grieving and longing for understanding the complex depths of mental health issues related to her and the world at large while appreciating her unending positive impact on me.”

In addition to this, Allred shares the instrumental epic ‘Good Afternoon’ which sounds like an abrupt wave of an unexpected greeting crashing over you when you least expect it.

For as long as he could remember, Allred always created music out of a kind of dissociative state which he finds alluringly easy to lapse into. A repetition of a motif is usually where he begins composing. But unlike his previous works, The Beautiful World firmly has one foot in reality and is deeply intertwined with Allred’s relationships, past and present.

For some musicians, a change in instrumentation, theme or learning a new artistic vocabulary helps them to move in a different direction. For Allred, a long period of introspection was more relevant to the development of his practice:

“I find beautiful irony when I consciously disconnect myself from working on music because it gives me more fuel and inspiration to engage in it more meaningfully when I resume. In the past, I used to work and create recklessly without boundaries which led to growth and success but at the cost of occasional disassociation. I would be checked out at times even while working [...] but now that I make music less often, I feel like I'm growing with what I do, and truly living life more. And since I'm getting more out of life, I have more to say. These boundaries have given me greater access to the things that inspire me, along with a peace of mind and the ability to rest when I maintain this balance.”

Through his correspondence with Erased Tapes label head and the album’s producer, Robert Raths, over the past year, he came to realise that everyone has a Lauren in a way – someone they’d lost. Through writing to Raths, Allred was able to draw out this thread from the work and position it more clearly as the central concept to this work. The music doesn’t reflect the chaos of trauma, instead it has a therapeutic quality. It was through this dialogue that Allred was able to create what may be his most cohesive body of work to date.

The 11 track album unfolds around 'Oh Lauren', providing the core of the album’s sentiment – how grief returns to us throughout life over and over. Embedded more than halfway through the album, Allred allows listeners to cohabit a meditative space through ambient textures, drones and ballads echoing the vocal sincerity of Arthur Russell, Daniel Johnston and the hypnotic storytelling of Robert Ashley. Allred’s gorgeous melodic sense creates its own universe where the album’s songs live and breathe. He also has an intuitive understanding of the space between each note, and how to manipulate their decay to create otherworldly harmonics which envelop the sonic tapestry.

To truly reckon with The Beautiful World’s emotional position, listeners must understand the importance of the figure of Lauren, and the significance she has had throughout Allred’s life. Lauren’s suicide as a child provided the catalyst for Allred’s lifelong grief. But it was death anxiety and grief itself which provided Allred a link to a universal relationship that people have with each other and the world they live in. Impermanence and loss are the driving force behind all of our connections.

The trance-like nature of The Beautiful World perhaps comes from David Allred’s time sense – particularly when it comes to memory and trauma. Time becomes non-linear rather than a straight line – where one can repeat or return to the same themes but older and in a different frame of mind. Grief continues to manifest itself in life and despite personal growth, there will always be moments where the same feeling will manifest itself again. The album encourages listeners to sit with the concept of grief, and Allred is hopeful they can find comfort and learn to process it in a healing way.

“This music was written in dedication to everyone in need of inner healing. No matter how we feel or how different this looks from person to person, we are all exactly where we are supposed to be right now in our process of healing,” he says.

The Beautiful World is therefore heavily influenced by Allred’s work in therapy, particularly his relationship to writing music. In the past, Allred would be composing music as a means to dissociate from his life, but the album sees him engaging and connecting more authentically than ever with others and himself. Despite his prolific previous works being made in the company of others, Allred needed to step back from the scenes that he’s worked in to discover what he really wanted to create. Allred concludes: “In the power of love, curiosity, humour, and reconciliation, we give you The Beautiful World.”