RIDE bassist Steve Queralt has been exploring some of his own solo material for a few years now, but found he was hitting a wall. As he reflects, “After a few false starts, I had started to doubt the project altogether. It was going nowhere.”
Though largely instrumental music, he’d hoped to have old friend Emma Anderson (Lush, Sing Sing) do the vocals on a few tracks he was working on. At the time she wasn’t really singing, and Emma politely turned it down. But once she built up her own confidence, putting out 2023’s exceptional “Pearlies”, she reached out to Steve again, hoping he hadn’t found someone else. He hadn’t. Steve says, “Emma got back in touch to tell me that she’d found her voice and could I send her some tracks. A few files back and forth and an afternoon in the studio later and we had ‘Lonely Town’ and ‘Swiss Air’.”
“Lonely Town” is the first single for his upcoming solo LP “Swallow” out June 13 on Sonic Cathedral. Immediately gripping, the dreamy guitars flow with throbbing bass, building on a simple, surging melody. Emma’s vocals are a perfect pairing, and the resulting 5-minute track feels decidedly Lush-y in all the right ways; hypnotic, soaring, uplifting, and tinged with a slightly uneasy sinisterness. The shadow builds in the closing minute, which is distilled down to echoing shards and bleak “Blade Runner”-ish humming.
The 9-track “Swallow” LP features mostly instrumental pieces, but Steve enlisted Verity Susman (Electrelane, MEMORIALS) who sings on “Messengers”, another strong tune on the finished LP. As Steve recounts, “Swallow has turned out so much better than I had hoped, largely thanks to Emma and Verity’s contributions which sew the tracks together and shape it into an album. I’d fallen out of love with it so many times I was thinking of calling it Loveless. But then, that wouldn’t be the whole story.”
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