London-based Swedish singer-songwriter Josefin Öhrn (previously of Grammy nominated Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation) debut album 'Cherry' featuring vocals from Bobby Gllespie (Primal Scream) and Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre), with guitar from Andy Bell (Ride).

Josefin’s most intimate and self-defined album yet, 'Cherry' explores themes of fresh starts, desire, love and grief. It taps into a new and very interesting phase of music, seen on recent releases from Robyn (Sexistential) and Lykke Li (The Afterparty), where the experiences of women are put out there without shame in colourful candidness, such records tap into a fascinating period of raw, intense and highly transformative self-actualization.

Josefin wrote the songs on 'Cherry' during a new phase of her life, it captures the sense of liberty, excitement and vulnerability that comes with such a re-birth. Explored with an intensity that’s sensual, vulnerable and unguarded. At its core lies the female gaze – not as a concept, but a lived experience with a sense of longing running through the album like a pulse: a longing for connection, for freedom.

Musically, 'Cherry' has echoes of the hypnotic psych-rock of Josefin’s previous band Josefin Ohrn + The Liberation (Rocket Recordings) but the arrangements, structures and mixing on 'Cherry' are less avant-garde and closer to the laid-back atmospheres of Kurt Vile, Lana Del Rey or Natalie Bergman with clear hooks and with Josefin’s voice standing front and centre – intimate, magnetic, unwavering – which allows for the album’s stark emotional immediacy.

Josefin personally asked Kalle Jerneholm Gustavsson (Soundtrack Of Our Lives), who she had worked with previously, to produce the album. “We recorded it in his studio, Svenska Grammofonstudion, Gothenburg. It’s an amazing studio where artists can stay, so I was totally living the album, breathing music every waking and sleeping hour as I was far away from my everyday life in London” explains Josefin. “It was a beautiful experience.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Electrified
2. Dreaming Of You
3. Cherry Tree
4. Lose Yourself
5. The Real Thing
6. Always On My Mind
7. What If
8. I Want You
9. Jag Ger Dig Min Morgon
10. The Shoreline 

Everything was just so intense. There was an alienation and awkwardness about Josef K, but that was actually very true to life for me. Listening today I find really difficult because it brings back so many memories, so many ghosts and characters from the past.

-- Paul Haig. A lot of what Josef K were about was as much to do with what not to play as what to play. Josef K could never have anything rootsy, no blues scale.

We were always looking for the modern. -- Malcolm Ross. Josef K are the great lost post-punk band.

Taking their name from the haunted protagonist of Franz Kafka s existentialist novel The Trial, they posed for photographs before brutalist and gothic architecture and produced visionary, often incendiary music that felt like the product of perpetual anxiety. And it really was. Through The Crack In The Wall is the first ever biography of the band, tracing their story from their origins in the leafy suburbs of Edinburgh through to their untimely implosion four years later.

It s a tale of fun and frenzy, filled with highs and lows. From their thrilling live shows, which left onlookers spellbound, to more anxious occasions confronting a baying audience of rioting anarcho-punks in Brussels; from a brief spell as press darlings of the inkies to the fateful decision to pull their debut album just as pop stardom beckoned -- one that continues to haunt them today. Drawing extensively on new interviews with the band members and those around them as well as contemporary press articles, the book explores the band s inner workings and analyses their relationships with Postcard Records supremo Alan Horne, labelmates Orange Juice, and manager Allan Campbell.

It re-evaluates their position in the pantheon of post-punk greats and considers how their music helped shape the UK independent scene of the eighties. More than anything else, though, the book s primary purpose is to celebrate the incredible music Josef K made and consider what makes it more vital today than ever.

London-based psychedelic stalwarts Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation are proud to reveal their third album 'Sacred Dreams' for Rocket Recordings. Continuing to dive into the deeper waters of experimentation, ‘Sacred Dreams’ is both a musically hefty amalgamation of reverb drenched space-rock and retro centric electronics, as well as an emotionally cathartic release for the band, marking a new direction and fresh approach.

Since their critically acclaimed album 'Mirage' was released, Josefin and writing partner Fredrik have relocated from Stockholm to London and have created a new Liberation around them - this new band consists of the powerful and intuitive assemblage of musicians; Maki (Go Team), Patrick C Smith (Eskimo Chain), Matt Loft (Lola Colt) and Ben Ellis, who’s worked with both Iggy Pop and Swervedriver. ‘Sacred Dreams’ was largely recorded at Press Play Studios (King Krule, Fat White Family, Yves Tumor, Stereolab, High Llamas and many others) run by Andy Ramsay of Stereolab, who also produced and even programmed his non synced drum machines adding a lot of inspiration to the album.

‘Scared Dreams’ invites you into the bands own dimensional soundscape, a world built with transcendental guitars, driving grooves and otherworldly, enchanting vocals, altogether seeped in layers of blissfully produced synths. Opener and lead single ‘Feel The Sun’ encapsulates this new direction perfectly before the anthemic ‘I Can Feel It’ makes the bands intentions known. Elsewhere playful 80s electronics sit alongside a shoegaze sensibility effortlessly and amongst the textured flow of the LP emerge pop hooks like the infectiously bluesy ‘Baby Come On’.

Josefin tells us “This album comes out of a period of heartbreak, loss and dissolution, but also of deep love, warmth and beauty unveiled in the middle of it. A sacred dream, the way we see it, is not necessarily a golden fluffy cloud river, but instead also contains all the shadows that need to be seen and felt in order to drop what has to go in order to truly live. And the dissonance of such a dream may not be immediately apparent, let alone the meaning of it. In a way all of these tracks seem to emanate from that place where we have almost reached a new shore, or maybe we missed it and are headed somewhere else entirely, but there’s no way of telling until afterwards.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Mine says: After the experimental krautrock LP ‘Horse Dance’ (2015) and the pulsing psychedelia on shop-favourite ‘Mirage’ (2016), London-based Swedes Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation return with their most diverse album to date, showcasing a variation of sounds, including, but not limited to, 80s synths, trippy, reverb-laden guitars and dreamy, 60s inspired pop. ‘Sacred Dreams’, which was written during a ”period of heartbreak, loss and dissolution”, is less of a sonic journey than its predecessors and instead seems to show that Josefin and her band don’t want to be confined to a particular genre. After opening with the electronic and motorik dance tracks “Feel The Sun”; “I Can Feel It” and “Desire” the Spiritualized-esque “Hey Little Boy”, the transcendental “Only Lovers” and the blues stomper “Baby Come On” lead the album into a hazier, mellower and more psychedelic direction.

TRACK LISTING

01/ Feel The Sun
02/ Honey Slumber
03/ I Can Feel It
04/ Desire
05/ Hey Little Boy
06/ Only Lovers
07/ Baby Come On
08/ New Horizons
09/ Caramel Head
10/ Let It Come
11/ Whatever You Want
12/ Floating Away