“That’s how they get you…They’re under the goddamn ground…” – an iconic quote from cult movie Tremors. Let’s face it, we might as well say the same thing about UK coldwave mainstays The KVB. Katy Day and Nicolas Wood aren’t all that preoccupied with updating their sonic touchstones to appease modern tech-savvy sensibilities. For there are still plenty of stones left to unturn by sticking to more time-honoured methods of within these potent underground sounds. And that’s exactly where the duo has enjoyed lurking.
On previous album Unity, The KVB injected new life into their shadowy retrograde wave/synth pop sound. On their new upcoming LP, also called Tremors – coming out on Invada April 5th (preorder here) –, they’ve stumbled upon a hidden subterranean passage. Whether they’ll encounter giant flesh-eating worms is rather doubtful, but the album’s first single “Labyrinths” does channel a more burrowing side of The KVB than we heard on Unity. Beneath its monochrome melody, “Labyrinths” seems to happily be lost at sea between buoys of didactic absolutes.
The KVB comment that “it’s the most aggressive track on the album and a nod to some of our early releases. Lyrically, it was inspired by the collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and its references to historical subjectivity; the flexibility of truth and construction of narratives.”
Indeed, there are always new inventive paths to reach the same place, and The KVB seem eager to embark on these possibilities on Tremors. Day and Wood says that the themes and subjects are “expanded on previous album themes of dystopia, apocalypse and the human condition, but with a more pessimistic outlook and deeper distrust than before. It also touches on themes of loss, and the resistance, lament and acceptance of inevitable change.”
Watch the video for “Labyrinths” below, which the band describe as “a visceral assault of digitalised nature, CRT screens and analogue glitch textures. We wanted the first video single to reflect the album artwork and the energy of the edit to mirror the aggression of the song.”
