Ghostly Kisses, the Quebec-based act, has released their second album titled Darkroom through Akira Records.
This album presents a mesmerizing blend of hypnotic electro-pop and trip-hop influences, creating a unique and immersive listening experience.
About the album by Ghostly Kisses:
“Last year, we opened an anonymous safe space for fans to share personal stories about their lives, called The Box Of Secrets.
We feel very privileged that fans chose to entrust us with their deepest secrets.
We read every message, and it’s become the main source of inspiration for this album.
So many people at our shows would tell us that they listened to our music through heartbreak, grief, pain, questions they asked themselves, so I thought we should give others a safe space to do the same. For this project, I wanted to live in those themes, those experiences, to make it a multidimensional conversation.
For example, we heard from a lot of fans from countries where they couldn’t openly love the person they were in love with, for political or social reasons. I felt that pain, identified with it in my own way, and knew many others would too.”
Traditionally, Sauvé and Santais would each set up in a different room, sharing snippets via email and only meeting up to finalize ideas. “Writing separately ensures we’re not influenced by anything else, and we can bring more depth to our process,” Sauvé says.
This time, the messages from the “Box of Secrets” provided an unusual baseline for that influence rather than just their own individual experiences, and the result refracts and shimmers kaleidoscopically.
After compiling demos, Ghostly Kisses brought in new collaborators to further bolster their new electronic palette: co-producers George FitzGerald and Oli Bayston.
Longtime engineer (and Santais’ cousin) Alex Ouzilleau further helped shape the work in the studio, and Gabriel Desjardins’ string arrangements add depth and drama to the proceedings. To test their boundaries even further, Ghostly Kisses tested their recordings while on tour, a new step in their process and a portal into connecting more with their music and their fans.
“We heard from a lot of fans from countries where they couldn’t openly love the person they were in love with for political or social reasons,” Sauvé says. “I felt that pain, identified with it in my own way, and knew many others would too.”
Each track of Darkroom’s magnetic run comprises its own world, with Sauvé’s vocals as the radiant arc connecting their orbits, the moments and themes shared by fans finding resonances—the whole Ghostly Kisses universe together even when expressing its loneliness.
In moments, Ghostly Kisses offer an awe-inspiring hope for connection, for love, even when it seems impossible.
By opening up their music to be the conduit for other people’s stories, they landed up finding their own.
And by doing so through the stories of their fans and in new, more kinetic tones, Darkroom should prompt that same hope in many around the world who may otherwise have felt the darkness creeping too far in.
Ghostly Kisses have just completed a packed tour of Europe, and will embark on their North American tour next week.
Darkroom gets: 📷📷📷📷📷📷📷📷/10.
Ghostly Kisses – Darkroom [Streaming]
