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Poliça and Stargaze announce collaborative album

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 9 November 2017

Poliça and Stargaze have announced that they will release a collaborative album, ‘Music For The Long Emergency’, on 16 Feb through Transgressive.

The first single from the record, ‘How Is This Happening’, was premiered this morning, and was written on the first day of American recording sessions for the album, which took place the day after Donald Trump was elected US president.

“We were all just horribly sombre”, recalls Poliça vocalist Channy Leaneagh. “That was an example of the truly healing effects of making music with your friends. And while it doesn’t necessarily make things better, it builds community”.

Work on the record actually began before that, in February last year, when Leaneagh and the other half of Poliça – Ryan Olson – travelled to Berlin to work with Stargaze. There they improvised over musical sketches that Olson brought with him.

“They were not even song structures, just electronic textures”, explains Stargaze’s André de Ridder, “and we started playing over them”. The subsequent collaboration benefited from them all starting off in the same room, de Ridder adds, “because we could see how their faces lit up when we played. I guess that’s where our minds met. And I guess that was where the ping pong started”.

Poliça and Stargaze then worked on music remotely, firing files back and forth over email, and occasionally meeting up for more recording sessions together. “[We wanted the record to] not just be Poliça songs with Stargaze pasted on top”, says Leaneagh. “We really wanted to maintain this conversation back and forth, and be a new version of both Poliça and Stargaze”.

The two bands will perform together at Oval Space in London on 28 Feb. Tickets go on general sale tomorrow.

Listen to first single from the new album, ‘This Is Happening’, here: