Sarah Assbring AKA: El Perro del Mar, has announced her new album Big Anonymous, will drop on February 16th, 2024. The album’s announcement arrives with the news that Sarah has signed with label City Slang, who will be releasing the project. Paired with these announcements, El Perro del Mar shares the first offering from her new chapter with the single “In Silence,” which comes with a haunting, accompanying visual, which is lifted from a short art / horror film, written by El Perro del Mar, longtime collaborator, stylist and art director Nicole Walker and photographer Joseph Kadow.

Speaking about the headspace she was in when writing the new track, Sarah notes, “As the feelings of grief and loss wear off, you enter another realm of guilt. The guilt of not mourning enough, of going on living though someone’s gone. This song is about the ghost not accepting that it’s dead. I realized I was actually thinking like this which made it increasingly difficult to move on. I’d stayed on with the dead. I think it’s a common thing and it’s such a dark place to be in. You can’t really reason with the dead. That’s something I’ve come to understand.”

The ten tracks on the forthcoming album originally arose out of a commission from, Stockholm’s historic Royal Dramatic Theatre. El Perro del Mar was given a choreographer and two dancers from the Royal Opera and allowed a free hand to stage a performance concert, which premiered in 2019. As well as El Perro del Mar, the musicians were Jacob Haage (her longtime partner and key musical collaborator) and Petter Granberg, both on various synthesizers. The songs emerged from an organic collaboration between the trio and were reshaped by the process itself: watching the dancers in rehearsal fed back into the compositions.

The forthcoming album confronts the existential questions surrounding life and death. Having lost a number of family members over the years, Sarah came to realize that she was haunted by grief that wouldn’t go away. She felt guilt for being alive when others weren’t, and was dogged by a sense of her own mortality. Although this album draws on her own experiences, it is not meant to be pure autobiography. The theme applies to all of us, and she takes on different voices and characters in the songs, to potent effect. Ultimately there is a cathartic relief to the record in accepting that life is finite, and there’s joy in appreciating and living in the now.

El Perro del Mar has been a relentless shape-shifter in the years between her first releases in 2005 to now, on the cusp of her eighth studio album. Her music has encompassed doo-wop redux, mystic ballads, electronic dance, loner’s laments, ecstatic love songs, film soundtracks, dance scores, global pop, political pop, existential pop and more. Upon the release of her debut album Look! It’s El Perro del Mar!, she was soon winning awards, being name checked by David Bowie and touring internationally with the likes of Lykke Li, José González, Taken by Trees and TV on the Radio.

El Perro del Mar
Big Anonymous
City Slang

1. Underworld
2. Suburban Dreams
3. Cold Dark Pond
4. In Silence
5. The Truth the Dead Know
6. Between You and Me Nothing
7. Please Stay (Anonymous Version)
8. One More Time
9. Wipe Me Off This Earth
10. Kiss of Death

Pre-order Big Anonymous by El Perro Del Mar HERE