Eilis Frawley: Fall Ahead
Vinyl / Digital / Streaming
Out seventh March 2025
Australian-born, Berlin-based drummer and percussionist Eilis Frawley releases her debut full-length album, Fall Ahead, by way of Sinnbus Information
The solo venture of Eilis Frawley (pronounced Aylish) combines direct and unforgiving spoken phrase amidst kraut-like rhythms. With a deal with social constructions, feminism, psychological well being, and storytelling she speaks fact to inventive insecurities, private tragedies, and the impacts of dwelling overseas.
While that is her debut album, Eilis has been making music for a number of years. She spent a a number of years in Seoul, South Korea, the place she performed in numerous bands together with BaekMa, a four-piece band hailing from the US, UK, Australia and Northern Eire. They fashioned in late 2013 ‘after a couple of boozy encounters on the indie dance ground’.
Eilis relocated to Berlin with Social gathering Fears, one other band fashioned in Seoul in 2016. She ultimately debuted as a solo artist in 2019, touring in Germany, the UK, and Australia, in addition to releasing her two EPs, 2019’s By no means Too Emotional and 2020’s Grownup Life.
It was with the latter she got here to the eye of Louder Than Conflict because the EP featured one in every of our tracks of that yr. Stats, is a blistering feminist social commentary which nonetheless right now calls for to be listened to, a observe which lyrically felt like a extra express, angrier sibling to Saffiyah Khan’s 10 Commandments on the then current Specials album masking sexual harassment, abuse, rape, home violence, panic assaults and mutilation (amongst different issues) till immediately stopping lifeless.
Fall Ahead has been co-produced by Kat Frankie, a long run fan of Eilis and affords
a complicated, experimental indie album with influences from pop, jazz and krautrock.
It’s a distinctive cosmos of sound – revolutionary, intelligent and all the time stylistically assured. It’s made up of current drums, experimental spoken phrase and layered vocals, generally spherical, generally playful synthesiser sounds and groovy basslines.
She explains, “In a world the place political expression in pop is commonly both loud and indignant or non-existent, there’s a want for nuance; ideally within the type of robust FLINTA (feminine, lesbian, inter, non-binary, trans and agender folks) voices that time out present grievances with a cool head and thus provoke change”. The artist achieves this feat together with her razor-sharp precision, whereas on the identical time taking a playful and experimental, refined take a look at her environment and alluring listeners into her very private, splendidly intentional-sounding emotional world.
As together with her earlier releases she doesn’t maintain again, a working example being the opening observe and up to date single, Be A Girl. A feminist disco observe through which the artist reads out dictionary meanings of misogyny, inequality and sexism, thus evading private judgement. Eilis explains she “trusts her viewers,” and provides listeners area to classify and really feel for themselves. The heaviness of the subject material meet assembly the danceable lightness of the synth and exact drums units the tone for the report.
She ventures into subjects reminiscent of psychological well being within the music trade on one other lately launched single, Hallucinations, and social fears within the post-COVID world, No Namer, however regardless of the ‘heaviness’ of among the lyrics by no means loses herself in gloom as catchy tunes are assured.
Describing her sound as a translation of her life into music. On the titular observe, Fall Ahead, we hear a siren/trumpet intro that the artist wrote, ‘impressed by her flat on a loud avenue’. The tempo picks up, accompanied by numerous backings, solely to return to the preliminary construction, ‘just like the altering emotional states of an extended day through which you initially really feel overwhelmed in a social context after which calm once more at house within the night’. Elsewhere, Feminism and anti-capitalist views are blended with the contemplation of interpersonal dynamics, the world view of each youthful, One thing To Do, or older fellow human beings, Waters, or the depiction of loss on James.
Then there may be the observe Players, the Eilis’s model of a Gameboy soundtrack, written with totally different scenes in thoughts, throughout many terrains encompassing underwater, mountains, forest, jungle and the desert… if Mario wanted a ‘montage observe’ for the subsequent film it’s this.. Fall Ahead is a report is a wild collage of various phases of her life, and within the truest sense of the phrase her lyrics are created from particular person traces that often happen to her on the practice, bus or bicycle and which she later places collectively into completed texts.
All through her personal world mixes with the political, providing an lively, profound, light-hearted and distinctive report by an artist who demonstrates monumental
musical talent, the braveness to experiment, and in addition actually has one thing to say. It’s clear
Eilis Frawley isn’t afraid to deal with substantial subjects and brings them nearer to us together with her songs.
Preserve an eye fixed out for dated in Europe and the UK throughout the approaching months…
Discover extra on Eilish Frawley by way of her LinkTree
All phrases by Iain Key. See his creator profile right here or discover him on Bluesky
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