20 March 2019

ALCABEAN is the musical vehicle of young Danish brothers Julius & Victor Schack.
They create melodious guitar synth pop colored with dreamy duet vocals that take
you to a blissful state of mind. They know pretty well how to write about daily life experiences and personal stories and wrap them neatly into modern-day tunefulness spiced with New Order and Tame Impala echoes. They just released their enraptured
debut album ‘CONFESSIONS’ and Julius & Victor will tell us all about it track by track…

Here’s the music…

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Here’s the track by track guide …

1. ATHENS
“‘Athens‘ started out as a synth based song back when it was in its early demo form.
We really loved the vibe of the song and we decided to reconstruct it and record it on
our respective instruments. The synth bass line from the original demo also became the main bass line on the finished demo. We really kinda went nuts on this song and we didn’t care about the length of the track. We just wanted to create a song on our own terms.”

2. CONFESSIONS
“We knew right away that confessions had to be the title track of the record. The lyrics and the vibe of the song really encapsulate what this record is about: the hardship of looking into your own fragile and yet egotistical psyche and realising you’ve become something that you never intended to be.”

3. TSUKUYOMI
“‘Tsukuyomi‘ was the first demo that we wrote for the album. ‘Tsukuyomi‘ is the song that opened us up to a new musical direction and from that song we kinda had a faint idea of how we wanted the album to sound and be aesthetical. This song actually started out really slow, as a downplayed almost acoustic demo. We then had the idea to speed it up, write a synth part and put an electric guitar on the song.”

4. ITCHY SKIN
” ‘Itchy Skin‘ is an amuse bouche on the album. Compared to other songs this was really easy to write. We gave ourselves a creative free-pass on this record and the song is a result of that. It stands out as a little different compared the other songs, yet it still fits the overall vibe of the album. This song was one of the least serious songs on the album and the solo at the end really embodies that. The slide solo was actually recorded with a small glass and not a guitar slide.”

5. ROOKIE
“We have an ongoing joke in the band about this being the only proper rock song of the album. It’s probably the only song on the album based around a guitar riff, which is funny cause that used to be how we started writing most of our older songs. As Julius puts it: “I remember listening to Victor making the demo of the song and I really loved the riff. I asked Victor jokingly after hearing the riff “Are we now all of a sudden making Rock music again?”

6. HOLLYWOOD
“This is a pompous indie rock song about living a mediocre life and accepting that while still living in a society where mediocrity often is seen as failure and self-realisation as the
path to happiness.”

7. RED
” Red‘ was probably the most fragmented of our demos when we started working on it.
We actually wrote the whole song before writing the lyrics. This gave us a chance to really write a story with narrative qualities to it. You follow the main character ‘Red’ who is feeling vulnerable and fragile and is trying to find solace in opening up to the people around him.”

8. FEEL
” Feel‘ was the first song we ever wrote 4-5 years back when we started. This song has been recorded and played live under every constellation the band has ever had. it was actually supposed to be on our EP ‘Head Down‘ but we just weren’t happy with the sound and feel of the song in that particular version. The song might be simple but it took us a long time to get it right, and luckily for the song we finally found a way to do it justice.”

9. KING THE QUEEN
“‘King The Queen‘ was reconstructed because we thought we could make it better. We
spent quite some time on this song trying to fuse the different elements of the record
into a song that had it all. The rhythm in the intro of the song was actually played on a
midi keyboard on the demo and our drummer tried to imitate it 1 to 1 when we recorded the album.”

10. MEET ME AFTERWARD
“The magnum opus of the record. We never had a doubt in our mind that this should be the closing track of the album. This is the longest song we’ve ever made and probably one of the longest we will ever do. In the writing process, we knew we wanted something with an epic buildup that still left some room for its more fragile parts. We already have a feeling in the band that this is gonna be the best song from the album to play live.”

Brothers in arms…

ALCABEAN: Facebook – ‘Confessions’ on iTunes