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Dinked No.5 Homeshake – Helium //Sinderlyn// (Released 15th February)

£17.99

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£17.99 – Dinked Edition Limited to just 300 copies worldwide

* Hand numbered
* Exclusive “Fruit Punch” colour vinyl
* Includes exclusive art print

£17.99 – indies Only Light Blue LP

When you walk alone, you’re never lost. At least, that’s the operating principle behind Homeshake,
the recording project of Peter Sagar. Over his first three albums, Sagar followed his own idiosyncratic
vision, a journey that’s taken him from sturdy guitar-based indie-pop to, on 2017’s Fresh Air, a blearyeyed
take on lo-fi R&B. Now, with Helium, Sagar is putting down roots in aesthetic territory all his
own. Landscape that he once viewed from a distance now forms the bedrock of his sound, and from
here, he looks back out at the world as if through a light fog, composing songs that feel grounded and
intimate, even as they explore a dispersed feeling of isolation.
It’s a feeling that comes through not only in the gauziness of the production, but also in the
vulnerability of the songs themselves. Sagar began writing Helium shortly after completing Fresh Air,
and in the middle of what he calls a “binge” reading of Haruki Murakami. It’s not hard to picture the
narrator of these songs as a distinctly Murakamian character: He moves through time by himself,
bemused by and insulated from a world he doesn’t quite seem to have been made for. Everyone
Sagar encounters here — including himself — seems to be a step removed from present reality,
whether by technology (“Anything At All”), solitude (“Just Like My”), or sweet fantasy (“Like Mariah”).
The record is stitched together by a series of instrumental interludes, synthesizer explorations whose
haziness adds to the suspicion that this is all an uncanny dream.
Which isn’t to say that Sagar is unmoored in his own world. In fact, much of Helium is the result of
what he calls “a much clearer mental state” than the one he’d experienced shortly following Fresh
Air’s completion. “I had a better idea of the sound that was working for this record and what it was
turning into as I was writing the songs,” he says. That’s owing in part to the album’s genesis. Where
his previous three records were recorded directly to one-inch tape in a local studio, Helium was
recorded and mixed by Sagar alone in his apartment in Montreal’s Little Italy neighborhood between
April and June of this year. Freed of the rigid editing process he’d endured before, he was able to lose
himself in pursuit of tone and texture. “I didn’t have to book time, compete for good hours, wait on
availability. I did a lot of it at home in the middle of the night,” he says. “It made me get more
obsessive about details.”
A budding interest in ambient and experimental music — particularly Visible Cloaks, DJs Paypal and
Rashad, and Jlin — pushed him to tinker with the micro-sounds that surround the songs here. It’s a
process he found creatively invigorating; even the tinkling boom-bap of Young Thug informs “All Night
Long.” It’s a far cry from the chorus-laden guitars of his earlier work. “Ever since I started introducing
synthesizers into my music, I’ve gotten more interested in texture,” he says. “I’d hit a creative dead
end [with guitars], so synths took over.” The warm chords of a Roland Juno 60 form the album’s base,
and gave him a clean palette with which to work. “No tape hiss, no humming power outlets and shitty
mixing boards,” as he puts it. “Everything just came out nice and pure.”
Still, for all the growth it demonstrates, Helium is at its core a singer-songwriter’s record made by
someone who doesn’t feel beholden to any particular set of sounds, textures, or instruments to get his
point across. In that sense, it feels closer to the bone, at once assured of its vision and remarkably
vulnerable. It’s perhaps our purest view yet of Homeshake’s home country.
Tracklisting
01 Early (1:31)
02 Anything At All (3:02)
03 Like Mariah (3:26)
04 Heartburn (0:36)
05 All Night Long (3:38)
06 Trudi And Lou (1:04)
07 Just Like My (3:28)
08 Nothing Could Be Better (2:52)
09 Other Than (3:33)
10 Salu Says Hi (1:28)
11 Another Thing (2:51)
12 Couch Cushion (2:15)
13 (Secret Track) (3:37)

Additional information

Format

Dinked Edition No.5, Indies Only Light Blue LP