The Naked And Famous
Jul 28, 2013
New Zealand quintet The Naked And Famous are pleased to announce the release of their sophomore album, In Rolling Waves, via Republic on September 17th. Returning to the airwaves, lead single "Hearts Like Ours," was first featured as Zane Lowe's "Hottest Record in the World Today" on BBC Radio 1. In Rolling Waves follows the band's widely loved debut album, Passive Me, Aggressive You. With global sales of over 500,000, the album spawned a US Gold single, "Young Blood," and took the band's YouTube and Vevo views beyond 25 million. Praised by the NME, it was "A classic case of lovely and beautiful: TNAF's passive melodicism and aggressive innovation clash in a dazzling blaze of psych/sonic fireworks".
Fronted by Alisa Xayalith (vocals/keyboards) and Thom Powers (guitar/vocals), The Naked And Famous lit a fire under an online fan base, with a video subculture built through YouTube and into radio. M83 invited TNAF to remix a single and a Tiesto remix transformed "Young Blood" into a club smash. Agencies fell into The Naked and Famous slipstream, and theirs became the go-to soundtrack for gaming, Hollywood and TV shows mining a zeitgeist of young and interesting. Twelve months previously, the band, including David Beadle (bass guitar), Jesse Wood (drums) and Aaron Short (keyboards), had been writing and recording songs in bedrooms on Auckland's North Shore.
By June 2012, The Naked And Famous had played to more than 600,000 people in 24 countries, but the band chose to hit pause and embark on a second album. After two years of near-constant touring, the New Zealand five-piece set up home in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles to begin work on the twelve track album. The resulting album, In Rolling Waves, produced by Powers and Short, along with Justin Meldal-Johnsen (M83, Beck and NIN) with co-production on two tracks, delivers darkly nuanced, intricately rocking electro gems once again born in bedroom studio sessions, then demoed in studios in Wales and Australia ahead of recording at Sunset Sound in Hollywood.