Years & Years premiere ‘Sanctify’ remixes
Years & Years
From Bernard Sumner/New Order and Michael Calfan
Available now on Polydor Records
LISTEN TO REMIXES OF ‘SANCTIFY’ HERE
‘Sanctify’ follows Years & Years’ celebrated debut record ‘Communion’, which reached number 1 on its release in 2015 (and went on to sell over 1.5 million copies), scored 4 platinum singles, 5 BRIT Award nominations, and concluded with a sold-out date at Wembley Arena. Their second album, thrillingly, also marks a new frontier in every sense of the world, as Olly recently explained…
“I want to take people on a wild and wonderful adventure through my dreams to a world that’s very different from our own. I’ve been thinking about this place for a long time, a place to tell stories from; about identity, sexuality, celebrity and performance. The video for ‘Sanctify’ centres around an audition against the backdrop of a future metropolis called Palo Santo. It’s the first part of a bigger jigsaw puzzle and my hope is that it confuses the hell out of people but also excites them in a mysterious and sensual way. We’ve deliberately hidden lots of different meanings and I want people to come up with their own interpretations, I’m asking people to jump down the rabbit hole with me and let their imagination run free. The thing I love most about pop music has always been fantasy and escapism so I thought, ‘well I guess I should try and be the pop star I want to see in the world and make the most ambitious and freaky and sexy thing possible’. I’m making these videos because I want to let people inside my brain and because I love living in my own fantasy world (always have, always will) – a place where sexuality and gender are blurred and magic is real. We live in a chaotic and accelerating world, we’re looking at depictions of the future to help us make sense of what’s happening right now. This is my vision of a possible future, one that makes us question what it means to be a human.”
Years & Years are a band intuitively connected to great, homespun British pop classicism, but – beginning with ‘Sanctify – now stand bolt upright on the world stage. Theirs has always been a tribal impact on pop, where the minority is always the majority; and in Olly Alexander they also have a once-in-a-generation front-man, who understands more than most his responsibility as a pop star. Part full-blooded, escapist fantasia and part social comment, Years & Years’ second album is about outlier pop as futurism once more, offering solutions when the world around is failing you. ‘Sanctify’ acts as its dizzying first glimpse, and a tantalising window into Years & Years’ surprising, deeply personal and otherworldly comeback. Or, as Olly puts it: “What I love so much about being in Years and Years is this fantasy that I’m allowed to live in. Anything can happen, everyone’s welcome and everyone’s safe. That’s the deal. So why not keep it going in that direction?”