A new beginning for Daughter.
With any band or artist it always begins with a song.
In those first unfamiliar minutes a relationship can start and also be consummated, a bond between listener and muse that in some cases will last a few infatuated weeks, in others a lifetime.
In the case of the Live4ever office and Daughter that song is probably not the one many would guess at.
From their 2013 debut album If You Leave it was the yearning indie folk of Youth that found an audience the trio still hold close today.
But, merely a bonus track for the Japanese edition of their second album Not to Disappear, The End was a dazzling psychedelic whirl, singer Elena Tonra’s words it seemed coming from the edge of the world. That for us was the song.
And then (almost) nothing. A third album released in 2017 under the Daughter name, Music From Before The Storm, was effectively the soundtrack for the game Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, whilst Tonra released a solo album Ex:Re the following year. Since then, it’s been mostly rumours and enigmatic silence.
Whilst in the interim this meant the song was on some kind of elastic loop, in the real world the trio – Tonra, Swiss guitarist Igor Haefeli and French drummer Remi Aguilella – reconvened last year and began swapping ideas across continents.
As they progressed defining themes emerged, ideas about how the narrow mental bridges between togetherness and isolation are made and broken. The result is Stereo Mind Game, an album with no less substance or gravity than its predecessors.
For those who want the strands of the present to be more closely connected to the past Dandelion, with its urgent shuffle but more organic feel, is the redirected letter from If You Leave’s era.
But Tonra’s words continue in part to rain down from her own lived experiences so that the dreamy visage of opener Be On Your Own Way – about a love affair where distance tried to snuff out the spark – confesses whilst instruments float around like Atlantic-sized waves.
This time as well as loss there’s anticipation too, Future Lover’s too close/too far balancing act is revealed with, ‘Gets so heavy when I think of you/I lie awakе, always the way/It’s always a trap, the insomniac/Buzzing at the back’, the drained-out guitars and tumbling percussion the only certainties to cling to.
Being up close to the singer has always been a feature of Daughter’s hold you close/was that too much aesthetic, but their sound has blossomed from its early roots in bedroom indie folk, a genre which overtook Daughter but they here choose wisely to leave in the past.
The delicate shoegaze of To Rage instead concentrates on a darker melancholy, and closer I Wish I Could Cross The Sea features backwards samples, distorted phrases and echoing children’s voices, the effect like a patchwork of sounds making a gateway between places which share no physical connection.
Leaving things to listener’s imagination comes with risk, especially on the candid, 90’s grunge imbued Party as Tonra approaches the role alcohol used to play in her life and how she imagined it helped when it was doing the opposite.
In direct contrast, Swim Back is the album’s apex, its rumbling bass, flowing synths and the work of a 12-piece orchestra skying their work into a place the horizon is always close enough to touch.
It’s a song that’s a promise of continued spiritual fulfillment between old friends. And if everything starts with a song, Stereo Mind Game is far from an ending.
