Strabe release ‘How Our Love Grows’ album

STRABE have today released brand new album How Our Love Grows, which is available now on [PIAS]. Featuring the singles ‘All My Heart’, ‘Honey’ and an AI-generated visual world to accompany, the record drops alongside queer floor-filler ‘When We Move’ and follows the band’s viral hit ‘Best Worst Year’ (which recently surpassed 12 million streams). Fresh from a London headline date at the Lower Third in celebration of the record and an upstairs gig at Outernet in support of Kid Francescoli, STRABE are also set to open for French 79 at The Garage on November 11th.

How Our Love Grows is accompanied by a visual for one of the album’s most powerful moments, ‘King of The Sea’. Beautiful and meditative, ‘King of The Sea’ is an ambient, electronic epic that shapeshifts like eddying currents – its stripped-back beginnings steadily transform into an all-encompassing wall of sound.“I wrote ‘King Of The Sea’ after my dad died,” Angelica comments, “in a moment I wanted to feel close to him. My Dad was many things – a storyteller, a father, a friend, and a lover of the sea. Some of my favourite memories with him are of late night moments when I’d go to him in the depths of a panic attack, and he would hold me and tell me stories of his sailing days. There aren’t always words to describe what this song means or where it came from, but it so perfectly reflects the more painful side to our album title – in losing someone, your love for them only continues to grow.”

STRABE are alt-pop duo Angelica and Emmet, whose debut album proves a bright, bittersweet exploration of grief, growth, gender, and personal evolution. STRABE originally met in the smoking section of Cork Jazz 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. With a sound that summons the wistful alternative-pop of bands like The Cranberries and The Cardigans – together with the electronic influences of Fred again..or Romy – 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 euphoric (see the shimmering disco of ‘When We Move’) and – on ‘King Of The Sea’ – emotionally raw, 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.

Watch out for more from STRABE to follow soon.

LISTEN to How Our Love GrowsLISTEN to ‘When We Move’

WATCH  ‘King Of The Sea’