GLORIA DE OLIVEIRA announces new album 'The Lying Swans' out Oct 30th via La Double Vie & shares first single "Fading Faces".

GLORIA DE OLIVEIRA - Announces new album 'The Lying Swans' out Oct 30th via La Double Vie - Shares new single "Fading Faces"

Photo credit: Beto Ruiz Alonso Today German-Brazilian musician and visual artist Gloria de Oliveira announces new album The Lying Swans is set for release Oct 30th via La Double Vie and is sharing the lead single "Fading Faces" alongside a self-directed video.    Darkness can be revealing. Joy feels different after grief, sharper and clearer. Though allowing the light in again after desolation can be incredibly challenging, especially when the wounds of the past still haunt the present. The Lying Swans, Gloria de Oliveira’s third full length, explores this in depth, like a work of Gothic literary fiction set in motion by the image of a woman fleeing a haunted house; this central image also shaped the album's visual world. Produced by Randall Dunn (Anna von Hausswolff, Sunn O))), Marissa Nadler) and recorded between Iceland, New York and Berlin, the result is an oneiric world where enchantment and danger coexist. “I numb my hurt one last time”, sings de Oliveira in the first single "Fading Faces", as a farewell to darker times. The ethereal lightness of the shimmering synth layers contrasts with thunderous drums and glam-rock inflected guitars. The resulting tension amplifies the song’s bittersweet beauty, fully embodied her siren voice, yearning and unguarded. The accompanying music video, directed by de Oliveira herself, depicts her stranded like a Pre-Raphaelite water nymph on a mystical Brazilian beach, between black cliffs and pink sand. On "Fading Faces", Gloria de Oliveira offered "This is not only the first single, but also the very first piece of music I wrote when I started working on the album. It was also the first song that Randall Dunn and I later recorded together in Iceland. In many ways, it’s the reason the album even exists - ‘Fading Faces’ required me to allow myself this degree of vulnerability that permeates ‘The Lying Swans’. Musically, it still follows the tradition of my previous albums to some extent, while simultaneously drawing on new modes of expression.” "Fading Faces" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqRhEtvTd_o "Fading Faces" on other streaming services: https://cargorecordsde.ffm.to/gloria-de-oliveira-fading-faces Drawing inspiration from poetry, literature, film and visual art as much as music, de Oliveira and Dunn crafted an album that moves effortlessly between the spectral and the pastoral, where echoes of Fantasy and Giallo film scores, ancient folk traditions and the rhythmic tenderness of Bossa Nova, MPB and Tropicália converge. The lyrics likewise weave together mythology with allusions to Milton's Paradise Lost and the poetry of John Keats, Emily Brontë and Anne Sexton. The Lying Swans seeks beauty amid darkness, embracing a proto-Gothic sensibility rooted as much in German Romanticism as in horror cinema, where love, obsession, and illusion become almost mythical. The Lying Swans thus unravels as a deeply personal story of trauma and its aftermath, referencing the Greek myth of Leda, wherein Zeus tries to charm a Spartan princess by disguising himself as a swan. As with all myths, this one can be looked at in different ways, as a tale of magical seduction, or an account of a of brutal violation. Leda’s consent has remained a topic of debate for centuries. The album traces the fractured sense of identity left in betrayal's wake, the fragile process of falling in love again, and the slow return of trust. Many of the songs revolve around acts of recognition: learning to distinguish truth from illusion, reading signs, seeing clearly, and trusting one's own perception again after years of doubt. The successor to “Oceans of Time” (Sacred Bones, 2022), her collaboration with David Lynch’s longtime sound designer Dean Hurley, “The Lying Swans” leads de Oliveira into new territories. Thematically as well as sonically, on these 9 songs the German-Brazilian artist seems to be stepping out of the misty realms of reverb and gauzy fuzz, displaying an earthier, more tactile and thereby vulnerable side. Still, they inhabit the very space where de Oliveira's emotionally resonant songwriting naturally thrives, magnified by Dunn’s instinct for dense atmosphere, hovering between dream and reality, concealment and revelation. Her seraphic, yearning voice remains the focal point, flanked by a stunning cast of musicians: Matt Chamberlain’s (David Bowie, Tori Amos, Pearl Jam) one-of-a-kind drumming lays the foundation for the album's idiosyncratic movement, wherein Lennard Zander's intricate guitars and Múm’s Gyða Valtýsdóttir’s cello provide rich, warm countervoices to de Oliveira’s agile soprano. Marilu Donovan’s harp (LEYA, Eartheater, Julie Byrne) and Úlfur Hansson’s Segulharpa and custom synthesizer soundscapes add a gossamer shimmer, while Ambient icon Tor Lundvall delivers a rare spoken word performance. Lina Andonovska’s transverse flute has a leading role, imbuing the songs with both an airy and unsettling tone, indebted as much to de Oliveira’s Brazilian roots as to 1970s & 1980s Giallo soundtracks, the atmospheric Italian horror mysteries that contain both stylized graphic violence and voyeurism, and splendid beauty.   The haunting tale of The Lying Swans unfolds like a work of Magic Realism, inhabited by birds, saints, sirens, bloody faces, ghost ships and spectral apparitions, inviting listeners into Gloria de Oliveira’s most immediate and complex work to date. The Lying Swans artwork: The Lying Swans tracklist: 1. Leda 2. Fading Faces 3. Sacred Hearts 4. The Voyager 5. Wounded Birds 6. The Wind Took it Away 7. The Perfect Con 8. Shadows in the Fog  9. Cranes in Flight Links: Bandcamp Substack Instagram Facebook YouTube