Badlands Shares New Single 'Bury You Whole'

Transboundary Swedish producer, composer and sound designer Catharina Jaunviksna returns as Badlands with a new single + video, "Bury You Whole." It's the latest taste from her upcoming album Call to Love, out November 18.

The track opens with a dusty mix of tranquil piano and daydreamy vocals before Jaunviksna deftly layers cello and a slow trap beat into a collage-like foundation for the song's radiant climax.

"'Bury You Whole' is a track about being stuck in the space where the heart still wants what the mind already knows one can not have," Jaunviksna says. "It's inspired by a teenage reminiscence, working as a memento throughout all stages in life. The video also tries to reflect that. When you are heartbroken, you just drift around aimlessly in a fog and listen to the same songs over and over again, just like when you were 14."

Call To Love follows last year's acclaimed album Djinn; a memorial to her late mother that earned support from NPR, SPIN, Under the Radar, KEXP, KCRW, Bandcamp Daily, and beyond. Where Djinn 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.'

This ability to meld electronic and orchestral instrumentation, vinyl samples, field recordings and other "analog dirt" into arrangements that are intricate, yet 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 soundscape has been crucial in getting my message across; what's beautiful and vulnerable emerges through imperfection and letting yourself lose control," she explains. "The record is a call to/for merciless, intuitive love, in an age where love is capitalized and being emotionally unavailable has become a desirable ideal. It's a tribute to love in all its wonderful, brutal, mean, horny and embarrassing forms." The result is an album that's at once both meditative and restless, set against analogue compositions that thread new wave, warehouse dub, trip-hop, and disco into Badlands' distinctly unconventional electronic pop.

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 (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 Danish Film School in Copenhagen 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:

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