Eora/Sydney producer and vocalist Skeleten announces his long-awaited debut full-length album, Under Utopia, due out 28th July on Astral People Recordings / 2MR, also sharing the lead single and video ‘Sharing The Fire’.
“I wanted to make music that felt like hope.”
On his thrilling and immersive debut album, Skeleten dares to imagine new ways of being that are not characterised by doom or despair – a challenge in an era defined more by feelings of futility, isolation and precarity. Across eleven tracks of free-flowing, transcendent, and often euphoric electronic music, he plays spiritual guide to a musical journey which is wonderfully in touch with realms beyond our own. Praising the power of comradery and community, dreaming of a future that is joyously boundless, Skeleten’s singular debut LP is, to borrow from one of his own lines, music for dancing “any way your body turns.”
“We’re more familiar with the idea of a dystopia in the modern world – that’s more close to our consciousness” shares Russell Fitzgibbon, “I think on this album I wanted to explore the importance of imaging and embodying a new world.”
Ideals of connectivity come to the fore on lead single ‘Sharing The Fire’, a song that crackles with optimism. A sprawling dance track with pulsating synths and Skeleten’s gentle, warm vocals, ‘Sharing The Fire’ imagines a future that is full of brightness and bliss. Born from an “almost frustrated desire to connect with more people and feel that sense of community through shared goals,” it’s a track animated by the promise articulated in the track’s chorus: “For all you know, summer could be around the corner”. The accompanying video clip, shot on 35mm, is similarly invested in ideas of companionship and gathering. Shot in a clinical, drab office space, friends and revellers fill the space with warmth and energy.
Written before and during the pandemic, Under Utopia was born out of a desire to connect with others and to shake the mantle of introspection that had been placed on his previous works. As the project has evolved, the artist has gained clarity on what he hopes his music will achieve: bringing people together, and creating an atmosphere of elation.
Threading together previous singles ‘Walking On Your Name’, ‘Mirrored’ and ‘No Drones In The Afterlife’, Skeleten’s debut full-length is a record that prioritises immediate pleasures without forgoing intimacy, reaching outward with inviting choruses and mantra-like melodies. “I think the album came out of the experience of feeling this great desire to reconnect and dreaming of the power of community,” says the musician. Suffused with cloudy, baritone vocals, glistening synths and truncated beats, it’s an 11 track collection “about seeing the world entirely new, full of hope and beauty, and all of us underneath pushing it upwards”. Sprawling and shimmering in equal measure, tied together by Fitzgibbon’s spacious, airy production, Under Utopia finds an antidote for the ever-pervasive gloom of contemporary life in the transformative power of love, community and an enduring, determined optimism that gestures toward a better and brighter future just over the horizon.
Skeleten – Under Utopia LP
Tracklist:
1. Generator
2. Mirrored
3. Walking On Your Name
4. Heart Full Of Tenderness
5. Territory Day
6. No Drones In The Afterlife
7. Under Utopia
8. Colour Room
9. Right Here It’s Only Love
10. Sharing The Fire
11. Everything We Need In The World
Photo credit: Danny Draxx
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