Badlands' Carnal to Release New LP 'Call to Love'

This Friday, November 18, Badlands - aka transboundary Swedish producer, composer and sound designer Catharina Jaunviksna - will release her new album Call to Love.

Across eight tracks, Jaunviksna has created an immensely personal body of work that's full of juxtapositions, at once both meditative and restless, dreamy yet carnal - oftentimes within the same song - the way that love tends to be. "It's a tribute to love in all its wonderful, brutal, mean, horny and embarrassing forms," she explains.

Throughout, analogue compositions thread new wave, warehouse dub, trip-hop, and disco influences into Badlands' distinctly unconventional electronic pop - perhaps best showcased on today's focus track, "I Want Blood."

Jaunviksna says, "This track sums up what the record is all about. Like, you have to kill yourself a little in order to get what you want. One can not keep her entire self and sanity, and at the same time win love over. It's an exchange. Love in exchange for control; love in exchange for your life as you know it."

Where last year's acclaimed album Djinn, a memorial to her late mother, featured sparkling, arpeggiated soundscapes, this new song cycle demonstrates Jaunviksna's continued artistic evolution as she unveils a fully self-crafted organic and vinyl-dusted sound, best described as 'outlaw electronica.'

"The soundscape has been crucial in getting my message across; what's beautiful and vulnerable emerges through imperfection and letting yourself lose control," she explains. This ability to meld electronic and orchestral instrumentation, vinyl samples, field recordings and other "analog dirt" into arrangements that are intricate, while seemingly effortless, is foundational to an album that is the result of stored emotions, both internal and external, channeled into a series of love letters to people and situations that were left unresolved.

The DIY approach is crucial to the distinct Badlands sound, where Jaunviksna exclusively writes, records, produces and mixes all material. She is the founder of the electronic record label, arts platform and production company RITE, based in Tambourine Studios (cradle of The Cardigans, Peter Bjorn & John) in Malmö, Sweden, from where she also makes original music and sound designs for film and theater, transboundary arts and documentary, as well as production and mix work for other labels and artists.

Jaunviksna started to explore analog MIDI and sampling as a teenager, finding a musical sanctuary in her own electronic compositions. Merging from music to sound design, she attended the sound design programme at the reputable National Film School of Denmark 2009-2011, but became the schools first dropout due to her constant longing to make music. She then formed Badlands as a home for her new electroacoustical fusions with vocals and released first Badlands EP Battles Within (2012), followed by album Locus (2016).

Listen to the new single here: