Asralwerks will release About You, the debut album by Albin Lee Meldau. The album which is available for pre-order today along with the release of the starkly powerful opening track Before & After marks the arrival of a remarkable new voice and an emerging artist to watch in 2018. About You will also include the standout songs The Weight Is Gone, Same Boat, and Lou Lou.
When you distill the 13 breathtaking songs on About You down to their essence, you’ll arrive at Albin’s motivation: Storytelling, says the 29-year-old singer-songwriter. That’s what will matter in the long run. If I achieve that, I’m happy. Anyone can sing. First and foremost, Albin considers himself a musical journalist who not only documents what he feels, but also what he sees. But before you discover his gift for weaving emotion, detail and humanity into a unique blend of classic soul and modern pop production, you will hear his voice and be bowled over. Maybe anyone can sing, but as NPR writes, Few singers can command an audience’s attention quite like Albin Lee Meldau. His voice is breathtaking, soulful, thunderous and impossible to ignore.
Indeed, on About You those pipes of his connect a rich history of rhythm and blue Al Green, Van Morrison to contemporary innovators like James Blake, Sam Smith and Hozier. The music does that too, swelling from spare guitar or piano-backed ballads, to Ronson-like mashups of hip-hop beats and sweeping strings, to hands-in-the-air soul-soaked dance-pop. That’s no doubt got a bit to do with Albin’s collaborators: writers like Jimmy Napes (Sam Smith, Disclosure), DJ Khalil (Anderson .Paak), and Neil Ormandy (James Arthur), plus producers Bastian Langebaek (Jessie Ware, Jack Garratt) and Jamie Scott (Rag’n’Bone Man, Ed Sheeran).
But lest you assume such a who’s who would sway a young artist from his mission, consider the fact that the haunting, unadorned song which introduced him to the world in 2015, Lou Lou, is perfectly at home on About You. And that’s where we come back to the storytelling: Just as that tune documents heartache as a woman close to Albin succumbs to madness, its neighboring songs are deeply poignant. They’re little novels about life from a man who’s heartbroken, who’s had his problems, who is weird, says Albin. It’s a breakup record and the start of something else.
The UK buzz for Albin continues to grow with a BBC Radio 2 A-List add for The Weight Is Gone, and following a sold-out London show at Omeara on April 17, Albin will return to the U.S. to support Jessie Ware on her upcoming North American tour, which includes shows in Chicago (Vic Theatre, April 29), Boston (Paradise, May 5), NYC (Brooklyn Steel, May 7-8), Philadelphia (TLA, May 10), and Washington DC (Lincoln Theatre, May 11).
2018 is shaping up to be a breakthrough year for Albin, the son of a Swedish jazz singer mom and a British punk rocker dad who hails from Gothenburg, Sweden. His debut album follows two impressive EPs that have already notched more than 30 million streams on Spotify. Last year he made his debut at SXSW and Bonnaroo, and NPR Music invited him to perform on their popular Tiny Desk Concert series. Albin was nominated for Best Newcomer at the 2017 Grammis (Sweden’s Grammy Awards) and won the 2016 Anchor Award, an international competition hosted by the Reeperbahn Festival in Germany that seeks out the best new emerging talent. He was selected by a jury that included producer Tony Visconti (David Bowie) who sang Albin’s praises in presenting him the award: Something is pouring out of his heart and soul when he sings.
