In late 2016, the three members of what would become Heartbreak Satellite – Ragnhild Jamtveit, Håkon Kjenstad and Tobias Pfeil – holed up in a Copenhagen flat and spent a week recording an album’s worth of eccentric synthesized material.
We first heard the results on February’s debut single, and today we reveal Follow, their sprawling new track. It tells of a relationship breaking down over obsessive behaviour, and – as the band explain – was originally recorded as a roaming extended jam.
“We recorded Follow in my tiny studio”, explains Tobias, a multi-instrumentalist in the band. “The basic parts of the song were made in an hour or two, and then Håkon started programming different drum beats, I jammed out some synth basslines and Ragnhild improvised some vocals on top. We ended up with a 15-minute jam.”
The final single, neatly trimmed down in later sessions and fed through old tape decks for a whoosy effect, plots an idiosyncratic path. Invading synths swirl aside Ragnhild’s peachy vocals, touches of art pop descending into peculiarity as a flurry of divergent instrumentation jostles for your attention.
Listen to Follow on SoundCloud below:
Follow, coupled with debut release Are You OK?, reveals a trio excelling in their carefree experimentation. The outro to the new track, influenced by free jazz styles and featuring saxophone from Tobias, is the new single’s star turn and – in his words – captures a “half-ecstatic, half-paranoid” mood.
Heartbreak Satellite’s new single is released tomorrow on Brilliance Records.