Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek are set to release their new album Yarin Roksa on March 14 — and it finds them highlighting the way Anatolian folk music and psychedelic aesthetics can merge into a hypnotic collage of influences and personal histories. The album’s title translates to “if there is no tomorrow” and focuses on aspects of hope, loss, and a communal resistance to social inequity.
Yıldırım grew up in Hamburg, though she was always surrounded by her family’s Anatolian culture and sought to pass on that generational knowledge and its musical identity to those who come after her — while Grup Şimşek experiment with a more kaleidoscopic sound, one that derives its wild soulfulness from multiple geographies.
Their new single, “Hop Bico”, is a take on an old folk standard that Yıldırım’s grandmother used to sing to her. It’s a call to action and speaks of a character named Bico who urges those around him to join him in celebration through dance. The music develops into a phantasmagorical parade of psychedelic movements and hypnotic vocals, a swirling collage of ’60s pop refraction and lithe Anatolian rhythms. It a track that feels as though it exists outside of the flow of time, untouched by the world’s weariness and empowered by those whose lives it illuminates.
Listen below.
Yarin Yoksa is due out March 14 via Big Crown Records. You can pre-order the album here. Follow the band on Facebook and Instagram.
