Caribou

In 2014 Dan Snaith aka Caribou released Our Love to overwhelming critical acclaim and top 5 ‘Album of the Year’ positions for the likes of The Guardian, Mixmag, Loud & Quiet and NME. Now, five years later, Caribou returns with his seventh studio album Suddenly, a warm, untameable and constantly surprising album about family and the changes we go though as those relationships evolve. Our Love was an open-armed exploration of the concept of love in its grandest form, both as an expression of gratitude to his fans and as an examining of that one thing that matters most in life. Suddenly however takes that concept and winnows it down, directly applying it to real life and the people to whom that love means the most.

“It used to be easier to make music that existed in my imagination only,” says Snaith. “That sense of exploration and discovery, the visceral excitement of creating something, is still there, but it doesn’t seem like it’s possible any longer to have the changes in my life not make an impression on my music”.

On this album, the exploration of love for the people in Snaith’s life is deeply personal and direct, little snapshots of his own life seeping into his music. In fact many of the tracks are written through the eyes of others, Snaith puts himself in the shoes of his loved ones and tackles what they’re going through head on.

Even the album’s title stems from his home life - towards the end of the lengthy process of this album’s creation Snaith’s youngest daughter added a new word to her vocabulary with dramatic effect – ‘suddenly’. She began saying it non-stop, which led to Snaith’s wife suggesting it as a title. 'Then I started hearing it everywhere, and it resonated on all sorts of levels,' says Snaith.

Most prominently, Suddenly refers to the moments of dramatic and unexpected change that occur at points in any life and within any family. Universal themes that can catch you off guard and change your life in a heartbeat. “There are specific things” he says, “whether those are losses and traumas from my life and the lives of the people around me, or reflections on the joys and challenges of seeing my relationships with my kids and my parents change over time ---- things from the grain of my day to day life that insisted on making their way into the music”.

Snaith also acknowledges that those dramatic moments are part of a slower process. These moments rear their head, for good or bad, during the day to day, gradual flow of life. “There's a tension between those sudden things which blindside you and the more glacial, gradual day to day changes”, he observes. “I feel like, and maybe others can relate to this, that it's a difficult thing to navigate in our lives. We are so caught up in the immediate - the details that require our attention every day - that we can be blind to the bigger forces shaping us. That's why so often when something drastic happens suddenly it catalyses all sorts of changes in our lives - our perspective shifts.”

Suddenly, will be released via City Slang on 28 February.