The Norwegian-born, Berlin-based duo Soft as Snow will release their debut album ‘Deep Wave’ on April 6th, via Houndstooth. It was created by Soft as Snow members Oda Egjar Starheim and Øystein Monsen, with additional mixing and production by WIFE of Tri Angle Records.

Their oblique leftfield pop recalls Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, deep Detroit techno, 90s IDM, Fever Ray, cold wave and the ‘Mutazione’ compilations, but is simultaneously fresh, original and groundbreaking, crowned with Oda’s esoteric and otherworldly voice.

Deep Wave follows two EPs for the same label – and as with those, the duo still avoid laptops, preferring analogue machinery, samplers, live drums and processed guitars – but this album marks a creative development, with their sound now deeper, more detailed and less simplistic than before.

Soft As Snow on the track:

“We kept a lot of the first takes. There’s something with that first immediate energy that’s really essential and hard to recreate later on. It’s more important for us that the vocals have the right energy and feeling for the song, than being recorded properly and having to refine the lyrics”, says Oda.

“I create the vocals and lyrics while we improvise; words and sentences come to me, but I don’t always understand the meaning behind them until later on. It’s an intense and intimate mental catharsis approach, in order to act out sounds and words.”

“What we seek is more on an unconscious level, connecting through the music and letting it take the form it wants”, adds Øystein. “But we’ve both always been drawn to the idea of pop music, and are interested in how far you can stretch the boundaries, before it becomes something else. For us, this is essentially a pop album.”

“We’ve been experimenting with arrangements and production. The sound is rawer, more experimental and noisy”, explain the duo. “What maybe differs most from the other releases is that we decided to keep a lot of recordings from the initial jams. Several of the tracks are more or less kept in the original form.”