Enigmatic Swedish experimental pop duo Cult of Y return with a brand new release ‘Glory Glory’, lifted from the forthcoming debut EP ‘Work In Progress’ due this November.
Following on from the duo’s noir inspired visuals for recent track ‘Mountain’, ‘Glory Glory’ continues the cinematic theme, it is a brooding cocktail of cinematic pop, gospel, rock, scattered electronics, laced with a heady dose of haunting gothic imagery.
The duo’s music half August Vinberg says: ”In my daily quest for samples I came across Odetta´s acapella version of Glory Glory. I found it so beautiful that I wanted to keep the production very spacious and minimalistic. This is a challenge for me since I usually like to bring out the big guns and make songs explode but this time it wasn’t right for the song. I re-recorded the vocals, added a bass and an organ and that’s pretty much it.
Often when I make Cult of Y music I’m looking for contrasts but in this case there wasn’t any need to do so because of the story in the video. Knowing where the girls are heading and what’s to come there’s already a dissonance between the beauty in the music and the horrors to come in the story.” About the video: “The video for Glory Glory sets the stage for what’s to come. For us, for our characters and for our audience. It contains some necessary travel allowance but first and foremost it’s a glorious beginning of an end.” Delving head first into our present time and capturing our collective feelings of angst, the audiovisual duo Cult of Y consisting of producer August Vinberg and film director Robin Kempe-Bergman, release ‘Mountain’ – the first chapter of the upcoming EP ‘Work in Progress’ – a collage of our fractured age that hits just like a fork in the road.
Like a symptom of our information age, Cult of Y ventures deep into our generational struggles with originality, loneliness as well as finding a collective sense of identity. The track is a cross-pollination of layered beats, samples and dark electronic soundscapes. Imagine the bastard child of Moby’s Play and Kanye West’s Yeeezus.
Add a fascination for pop culture, the occult and a love of David Lynch, Maya Deren, Lars von Trier and you get Mountain, an audiovisual release that grapples with the horrid feelings of our unoriginal reality. Jesus on the cross, followed by a knocked-up belly turning into a balloon, which later transforms into a mask surrounded with burned wooden sticks – almost creating a feeling of a newborn sun.
“Hallelujah”, a voice from long ago calls out as a woman feasts upon a greasy hamburger replicating Warhol’s famous performance, while in the next scene the ketchup turns into blood…and a muted choir of parents cries out in agony. In this grainy and gory black-and-white music video, Cult of Y experiments with the idea of an infinite storyline containing every narrative possibility. Sounds, scenes and visuals, all borrowed or stolen, creates a continuous true crime puzzle that exists simultaneously on different levels of time and space. Because according to the duo time isn’t relevant anymore.
”In a way our reality is a remix of everything that’s come before, which means that nothing is original nor sacred anymore. It’s sad but at the same time liberating.” concludes August Vinberg who started out singing in the deathcore band Science of Demise but then turned to song writing and production having worked with artists like Selena Gomez, Marshmello, Kendrick Lamar, Camila Cabello, Karol G, Iggy Azalea and JAX to name a few. ”The music of Cult of Y is based on friction and sprung from layers of long lost songs and beats. You could call it intrusive but the purpose is simple and sincere – to make something old sound new.” “When creating the music video for ‘Mountain‘ we talked a lot about the middle ground between fact, fiction and what constitutes belief” says the director Robin Kempe-Bergman, one the original creators behind the internationally acclaimed audiovisual project iamamiwhoami. “The idea was to create a framework of images and ideas that could carry the strange madness of our modern times”.
Cult of Y is like a fork in the road; a point in life where we have to make a vital decision. The vertical base of the Y represents youth. Left embodies the physical and earthly path and the right is the spiritual. In this duality Cult of Y patches together an alternative reality. Evidently revealing that the greatest horror doesn’t come from anyone else but from within ourselves.
