Strabe share new single ‘Memories’, announce debut album ‘How Our Love Grows’

STRABE have today premiered brand new single ‘Memories’, which is available now on [PIAS]. The band have also confirmed details of debut album How Our Love Grows, due for release on September 15th and introduced in style recently with ‘All My Heart’ (alongside a stunning, AI-generated video). Having gone viral for their first track ‘Best Worst Year’ – which surpassed 10 million streams over the pandemic – and dropped acclaimed first mixtape ‘JUVENOIA’, STRABE will launch the record at a London headline date at The Lower Third on September 14th.

As the band begin their new era, ‘Memories’ also sees STRABE looking back: on past love, those relationships that shaped you, and who you are today. With a sound that summons the wistful alternative-pop of bands like The Cranberries – together with the emotive, electronic dance influences of Fred again..or Romy – it’s all washed in a blue connecting with the water-theme and visual world of STRABE’s upcoming project. As the band themselves put it, “Memories’ perfectly toes the line between the sunny, bright pop side of this album and the deeper, more emotionally delicate sounds we have created in other tracks.” 

STRABE are alt-pop duo Angelica and Emmet, whose debut album – How Our Love Grows – proves a bright, bittersweet exploration of grief, growth, gender, and personal evolution. STRABE originally met in the smoking section of Cork Music Festival, bonding over their eerily similar music tastes before quickly realising that they each represented the missing piece of the other’s creative dreams. Angelica, who is originally from Edinburgh, had pages upon pages of lyrics without a real home, while Dubliner Emmet had an electronic solo project without a voice tethering it all together. Back then, Angelica was on the run from themself without even realising it, grappling with both their sexuality and their dad’s death. Many of the earlier STRABE songs that formed debut mixtape ‘JUVENOIA’ tap into this shimmering sense of escapism, with the anthemic ‘Best Worst Year’ or ‘Life On Pause’ soon appearing prophetic for a generation whose own coming-of-age was seized by the pandemic.

A furiously prolific group, STRABE moved to London between lockdowns and set about making music IRL again at last. Before their first body of work had a name, it had a colour – a deep vivid blue, beaming out of the cyanotype prints that Angelica began making throughout the writing process, and percolating like rushing water through the genre-fluid production work of Emmet. STRABE’s songs, too, seemed to traverse deeper and deeper into the hue: first single ‘All My Heart’, for instance, is the joyous sound of queer love as your authentic self, landing alongside a video directed by Tom Furse (The Horrors) that transformed a live seaside performance into work resembling a moving Matisse painting. How Our Love Grows navigates those choppy waters of young adulthood, from the swelling highs to what happens when the wave breaks. In moments both hedonistic and rawly intimate, one constant proves to be the tight friendship of Angelica and Emmet themselves, an opposites-attract bond allowing STRABE to weather whatever life throws at them.

With support across 6Music, BBC Introducing and their first ever live shows under their belt – including recent festivals such as Dot to Dot – pre-order How Our Love Grows now and watch out for more from STRABE to come soon.

LISTEN to ‘Memories’

PRE-ORDER How Our Love Grows

WATCH / LISTEN to ‘All My Heart’

LISTEN to Juvenoia

LISTEN to ‘Best Worst Year’