Today – February 15th – Paris-based three piece Oracle Sisters share brand new single “Hot Summer,” taken from their long awaited debut album Hydranism, due April 7th via US label 22TWENTY. The band also announces an additional run of North American dates alongside their previously announced UK & EU dates. (Full list below).
WATCH THE VIDEO FROM ‘HOT SUMMER’’ HERE
“Hot Summer” sees the band incorporate novel brass and woodwind elements into their signature pastoral arrangements, brought about by a chance encounter with a saxophonist on a summer’s evening. The breezy, earworm of a track invokes a sense of halcyon nostalgia, gently rising to a crescendo and a big brass flourish to underpin its bittersweet nature. The video, directed by Jade de Brito Lopes, sees the band slip into playfully eccentric animal costumes, causing general havoc to the streets of Paris. Speaking on the track the band adds: “This song wrote itself in Greece, nonplussed or too complicated in its demeanour, it’s a monologue told to yourself, under your breath out on a clandestine stroll.”
At the tail end of 2020, Oracle Sisters decamped to the island of Hydra, Greece to write and record their debut album, Hydranism. Recorded over the course of two months, the 11-track album reflects a world suspended in time between the future and the past, and embraces larger than life ballads, intimate folk songs and table thumping rousers spun with the silk of poetic reveries.
Having released 2 critically acclaimed EPs in Paris I & Paris II in 2019 and 2020 respectively, Hydranism has been years in the making. A truly ambitious debut, merging the band’s influences of folk, rock, jazz and blues, Hydranism is set to be one of 2023’s most anticipated albums. “Hot Summer” follows on from the band’s sprawling epic of an album opener “Tramp Like You,” which was praised by the likes of DORK, DIY, CLASH, The New Cue and more. Watch the video here.
Oracle Sisters make music that is at once melodic, poetic, and visionary. Working with the lightning speed afforded by the simplicity of a piano and a guitar, they construct complexity through their lyrics which stem from observations of everyday life to the broader planes of symbolism. Their melodies, intertwined with harmony, always strive to uplift and surprise in the spirit of a great pop song coupled with the depth and feeling of a timeless folk song.
Born of an almost forgotten friendship stretching back to their childhood, Lewis Lazar and Christopher Willat stayed in touch after leaving their home in the flatlands of Belgium and scattered between New York and Edinburgh. It was in their early years of playing in rival and ultimately the same bands that their first connection as songwriters developed with Chris on drums and vocals, sometimes picking up the guitar with Lewis to pen an idea between their early shows. Amidst the whirlwind of pursuing their respective careers as underground cabaret singers and promoters, studying mathematics and philosophy, painting on commission, and writing as solo artists, they found their songwriting connection unbreakable and hard to match. When the opportunity was presented to them to move to Paris to help run a friend’s newly opened Cabaret in 2017 called “Le Carrousel” (a stone’s throw away from le Moulin Rouge), they jumped at the opportunity and spent their first year writing songs daily in and amidst a blooming scene of artists in Paris that included Papooz, Polo & Pan, Antonin, Kids Return, l’impératrice, M…and a healthy group of Tarot card readers, Astrologers and soothsayers.
In this atmosphere of songwriting and social serendipity they coined the band name “Oracle Sisters” and soon after met their first sister: Julia Johansen, a Finnish songwriter who had just arrived in Paris, guitar in hand, with a small part in a film and an even smaller suitcase after a few years travelling the world. Although they first welcomed her to be in the band due to her talent in singing harmony and how her voice blended perfectly with theirs…her secret talent on the drums soon became apparent, and thus began the creative adventure and roll of dice that is the “Oracle Sisters.”
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