Buy link: felixlaband.bandcamp.com/album/the-soft-white-hand
‘Snug Retreat’ is the second single taken from Felix Laband’s latest full-length album “The Soft White Hand”. The track ventures into unusual territories for Laband, exploring the alternative pop sounds of bands such as The Cure and New Order to name a few. Music that had a deep influence on Laband during his teenage years in the late ’80s has been re-interpreted in the year 2022 resulting in the simple yet beautiful track “Snug Retreat”.
Released by Munich-based Compost Records, the 14-track album is Laband’s first full-length offering since the critically acclaimed Deaf Safari in 2015. It is heralded by the single “Derek and Me”, and is being pressed on vinyl for distribution globally.
In The Soft White Hand Laband works with source materials that will be familiar to those who know his previous four records – Thin Shoes in June (2001), 4/4 Down the Stairs (2002), Dark Days Exit (2005) and especially Deaf Safari which reached deep into the South Africa scene and its political culture to inspire its vocal and music sampling. However, the disengagement he felt from his homeland during his latest album’s creation – an abiding sense of untethered-ness to place and space, exquisitely rendered in tracks like “Death of a Migrant” – is perceptible in Laband’s desire to illuminate instead aspects of his own life.
“For this album, my source material became almost autobiographical as opposed to African statements I’ve worked with previously,” says the artist. “I have sampled a lot from documentaries from the 80s crack epidemic in impoverished African American communities and believe my work speaks unapologetically for the lost and marginalized, for those who are the forgotten casualties of the war on drugs. In the past, I have had my issues with substance abuse, and I know first-hand about the nightmares and fears, what it feels like to be isolated and abandoned.”
Release date: November 4th, 2022.