Communion

With their luminous brand of electro-pop, London-based trio Years & Years layer sweetly smooth vocals over bright and heady beats to create what they call “music you can dance and cry to.” As winners of the BBC Sound of 2015 Poll (an honour previously granted to such critically praised hitmakers as Sam Smith, Adele, and Ellie Goulding), bassist Mikey Goldsworthy, keyboard player Emre Turkmen, and vocalist Olly Alexander have spent the last few years charming audiences worldwide by merging R&B, deep house, and classic-pop with both elegance and abandon. Years & Years are now poised to take that early promise and breakthrough with the release of their highly anticipated full-length debut album, Communion. Excitingly, they are also leading the pack to be one of the first bands to embark on the new global Friday release date initiative – New Muisc Fridays – which means their debut will be released to 45 international territories on the same day.Released on Polydor Records this summer, Communion features recent #1 single ‘King’ — a gorgeously synth-washed track that reveals the raw yet lovely emotional power of the band’s gracefully crafted sound. To achieve that sound, Years & Years recorded and self-produced Communion in London with the help of collaborators like Mark Ralph (the producer/engineer behind Hot Chip and Hot Natured), matching an inventiveness inspired by such artists as Flying Lotus and Radiohead with a daringly confessional lyrical sensibility. The album was mixed on three different desks, each with their own distinct history – Conny Planks’, Tony Visconti’s and with final touches all mixed on the desk Dr. Dre recorded ‘2001’ on. On the album, Years & Years shape their soulful ingenuity into songs that never hold back from looking at the darker and thornier sides of love. On the album-opener ‘Foundation’, a stark yet crystalline soundscape builds the perfect backdrop for Alexander’s hauntingly delivered lyrics (“All the things I want/I really shouldn’t get”). ‘Desire’ unfolds as an epic and giddy dance anthem that slyly flips the script at the chorus (“I want desire/Because your love only gets me abused”). The somber strings and delicate piano work of ‘Eyes Shut’ gently conveys the pain of a slowly breaking heart, while the urgent beats and chilling piano of ‘Ties’ brilliantly echo the frenzy of emotional unraveling (“It’s so beautiful to see you lie/Are you having fun?”). And on ‘Memo’, Communion closes out with a falsetto-laced slow jam featuring crushing lyrics like “I’m gonna take your heart/Love you in the dark/No one has to see.” Communion also offers its share of songs with a more joyful and blissed-out bent. New single ‘Shine’ begins with driving beats and dreamy R&B harmonies and then morphs into a full-throttle dance number, gloriously capturing the butterflies-in-the-belly thrill of falling in love. “The metaphor of ‘shine’ and ‘shining’ comes from the way somebody can make you feel totally brand-new and special and re-made in the light of their love, but how that can feel incredibly unstable and overwhelming and make you want to destroy yourself,” explains Alexander. For Years & Years, instilling Communion with so much pure feeling was mainly a matter of carefully mining their own experience in heartbreak. “A lot of the lyrics are about a relationship of mine that ended last year,” explains Alexander. “It was a chaotic situation where I wanted to win this person’s love and never succeeded and felt really rejected, and that’s where all these songs came from.”Fresh off a series of sold-out tours all across the globe, including selling out two nights at London’s Heaven in March and two nights already sold-out at Londons Shepherd’s Bush Empire this summer, Years & Years are fast gaining recognition for a high-energy live show that adds another dimension of heart and intensity to each song. “I grew up on people like Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell, but in the past few years I’ve become really passionate about electronic music and how there’s no limits to what you can create with it,” says Alexander. “You can push the sound in this crazy way, and still keep it as real and honest and emotional as any other music out there.”.