PAPER BIRCH is the new experimental lo-fi brainchild of Fergus Lawrie, founder member of cult Glaswegian indie rock scourers Urusei Yatsura (check the low-slung brilliance of “Fake Fur”), and Dee Sada, elsewhere of London experimentalists NEUMES and An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump.
The two seekers found each other as everything kinda pants globally last May, united by that rollercoaster we all went through of despair, fragility and hope, bouncing sounds back aad forth between London and Glasgow as we all crawled those lockdown walls.
That zinging about of sounds has now come to fruition, as they’ve garlanded themselves with the name Paper Birch, signed with Reckless Yes – home of Fightmilk and LIINES – and have a nine-track debut album, rejoicing in the name morninghairwater, set for a July 30th arrival.
A first single has arrived with us in the shape of the empathetic, textural “Love For The Things Yr Not”, which is a quiet noise-country by way of the Glasgow scene two-handed gem. Brittle, Velvetsy, insouciant – Vaselines and Shop Assistants fans will find much to love about this track.
“I’ve always loved male and female vocals from 60s’ pop to Bollywood songs to Shane McGowan and Sinead O’Connor’s “Haunted”, so it was amazing that Fergus was up for both of us singing the majority of songs on this album,” Sada reveals.
“Written, recorded and produced during the first lockdown, morninghairwater is a collection of thoughts and sounds which represent the emotional space between clinging on to the old pre-pandemic world and hurtling into a strange, unknown, terrifying new world,” she says.
“It’s a testament to love, hope, beauty, fear, loss, sadness and isolation.”
We’re told to expect a melting pot of genres as morninghairwater twists and turns through moments of 60s’ inspired indiepop, fuzzed-out and angular shoegaze and glitchy electronic soundscapes. And work is already under way on album the second.
Paper Birch’s morninghairwater will be released digitally, on CD and on limited purple and limited purple smoke vinyl on July 30th; it’s available to pre-order right now, over at Bandcamp.
