New Album: "Idols & Vices" out today!
Enter the Void.
Today is the day. After 4 years in the making, it is finally out!
Idols & Vices (Vol.1) LP is out now everywhere.
TRACKLIST
1. Right to The Head (Intro)
2. Demi God (feat. Sahtyre)
3. Force Field (feat. Sahtyre)
4. Back 2 You
5. Stuff I Don’t Need (feat. Banks)
6. Space Jam (feat. Tommy Raps, Sahtyre)
7. I Wonder (feat. Ivy Sole)
8. Ride or Die (feat. Tommy Raps)
9. Honeycomb (feat. Candy Crush Saga)
10. RNTBCK (feat. Sahtyre)
11. Tethers (feat. Fatboi Sharif)
12. Catch Ya in the Lie (feat. Le’Asha)
13. Keen (feat. DRAM)
14. The Moment (feat. Dawn Richard)
15. Stay Strong (feat. Taylor Graves)
Let me welcome you to Idols and Vices…
This is a world where you can become larger than life, reinvent yourself and indulge in the abundance of the online realm. It is a temple where we come to worship and lose ourselves to find ourselves. We awaken to a sense of belonging, absorbing the euphoria of dopamine and novelty. We can lust for what we don’t have and aspire to optimize our wellbeing through Wellness culture (while the loneliness grows.) We find a new 2D lover or a best friend. We scour our exes socials for a photo of their new girlfriend or compare ourselves relentlessly to the new standard of beauty. It all lives here in the twisted abyss and the journey is to be both explored and feared for its power. Like falling in love, we are sedated and fall for a series of selves in search of the substantial.
These songs center around themes of intoxication and our connections through the matrix of social media. The personas we create lure us into becoming like robots, losing our autonomy to higher powers we invented. This is a world of toxic-celebrity worship. We are both stimulated and bombarded by the internet with its never-ending promises and temptations. Through this journey into the void however, we can find the light and I wanted these songs to embody the cacophony we encounter and also to reveal a guiding voice running throughout that calls us back.
Through the disillusionment of this false world with all of its’ Demi Gods and pursuits of more, more, more, our characters come to awaken and abandon the world of fantasy, returning to a state of presence.
How it all started…
While making my record “A Reckoning” I would go out to LA and make a lot of music with my friend Taylor Graves (Thundercat, Flying Lotus). The songs we were making felt more heavy and beat driven so I kept putting them aside until I found the right home for them. It soon became a clear that these songs belonged to a new project.
Taylor and I began to produce out the tracks more during the pandemic, and what started as a fun idea for a free mixtape quickly became an emerging world in of itself.
Sonically, I drew inspiration from some of my favorite artists (from BEAM to Jill Scott and Outkast,) especially those who flip their worlds up to create an experience from start to finish. I designed the album to be digested that way and it is specifically made for headphones, so I hope you have some good ones!
I wanted the record to feel like a place where the collaborators and I could shape shift into characters that either enlighten us or heighten our personas into Messianic personalities that we fall in love with — a kind of self-worship.
Each collaborator brought out a different side of this dangerous pilgrimage, traveling through space on an escapade away from themselves then eventually back.
I had made a lot of experimental beats and strange vocal samples over the years (sometimes taken from improvised jams) so I would send them to Taylor and he would design beats behind these samples. I’d get so inspired and kept imagining other artists alongside me. Then so it began, the collaborative vision was born.
Honestly — it’s hard to find people who feel real and not full of facade in the music industry. Over the years I’ve become close with a lot of these collaborators and I wanted to put that mutual respect and excitement into a body of work.
I envisioned this record more like a film than a sound bath. So I brought the incredible New Zealand born animator Greg Sharp on after seeing a music video he made for Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
Together we dreamed up a storyline where our protagonist walks through a Vegas-like landscape of full of altars. She is both taken by the digital world and almost destroyed by it.
Each animation acts like an episode to a strange anime film we invented in our imagination. We wanted to capture the strangeness of this new reality and the psychedelic bend of the music.
You can watch all of the animation episodes here.
The object of my fascination…
I added one last song to the album in the final weeks of working on it. I was asked to create a song for Candy Crush as part of their new music season alongside another artist I love called Tokimonsta.
I sampled sounds and string flourishes from the game itself and built a playful little world of saturated color and sonic-sugar-highs. I’ll be sharing more “Behind The Scenes” moments from this clip so you can watch the process of how it all came together but if you haven’t seen the official music video yet, you can watch it below!
What do YOU think of the new album?
Comment below!
Love Kimbra
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Paragraph time!
I've been playing your album on repeat at work today (and in the bath before when you were teasing one track at a time.) I always have to keep an open mind as you're always reinventing your sound to keep us on our toes. My favourite so far is probably The Moment featuring Dawn. The harmonies just flow over and around each other and the beat is reminiscent of the vibes in the Boyfriend Dungeon by Marskye. Back To You gave me Final Fantasy VII vibes with the crystal-ly notes in the chorus. The gating effect in Honeycomb reminded me of Disney/Pogo which I appreciated so much. Stuff I Don't Need has a really important message and I hope people play it when they want to communicate better with their lovers.
I feel like Space Jam, Demi God and Tethers need to be a front and centre listening experience with a good sub to appreciate the bass lines. Wind down that window and roll down the street.
Three minutes in and it's already dope. Congratulations, Kimbra.