Trentemoller Trentemoller Limited Edition Vinyl Red

Trentemøller’s new untitled full-length album harnesses a noisy, all-enveloping welcome, exploding with the force of a supernova before dissolving into a vapour trail of swooning vocals. Across 10 songs, a journey towards dynamic yet bittersweet frontiers of sound gathers pace, pitting maximalist guitar-noise blowouts against some of the most bruising shoegaze you’ll hear this year. Just a few moments in, and you already know the Danish polymath is once again rewriting his story for a more vibrant, outward-looking chapter of his aesthetic.As Trentemøller puts it, “The noisy got noisier, the dreamy got dreamier, the melodic got even more melodic. I was ruthless this time. Okay, kill your darlings! If a track didn’t give me a feeling of freedom, wanderlust, sorrow, love or that pure ‘I don’t give a fuck’ feeling … It was gone”, he says.“Swerve”, the powerful starting point, and the first song he wrote for the record, crashes into searing walls of sound that work in stark contrast to the Copenhagen artist’s previous full-length, 2024’s haunting Dreamweaver, and adds a disorientating edge to an album built from extremes. Recorded with Vienna-based singer Sakura, “Swerve” draws you into the gut-feeling immediacy of Trentemøller, wedding a wave-like guitar glide to tsunami-sized swells of multi-layered noise.This radically intuitive feeling also persists on “Visceral”, an anthemic soundscape of stratospheric jet-engine textures and blistering emotional rock lifted to infinity again by Sakura. Taking a similarly uncompromising stance, “Your Love Walks Alone” hurls itself down dark and gothy corridors of industrial fuzz. “A depiction of pure love slowly winding down and how it affects you in those moments where you realise you’re being “replaced,” says singer Sune Rose Wagner.Elsewhere, deconstructed synths screech into a cavern of feedback and brutal guitars on one of the record's most hard-hitting and uncompromising songs. “"Coyote" is about that disillusionment when you get closer to someone and realise the closeness made you love them less, not more. It's about seeing through somebody, the bitterness and sadness that comes with that. It's the only song on the record where I ended up writing the lyrics, and the Coyote itself came from Emma, this idea of the trickster, the one you can't quite trust. It stuck, and gave the song its title. There's no clean resolution to it, just the quiet acceptance that there's nothing left to share,” explains Trentemøller.The inclusion of vocals on every album track for the first time in Trentemøller’s history gives the album its own unique coordinates - tricky to pull off but handled here with impressive cohesion, perceiving the vocals as “an extra instrument” to play with. “I knew early on exactly who I wanted singing on these songs, people I deeply respect and could already hear in my music, friends and a few I’d never worked with before. We never met in the studio; everything was exchanged remotely. That suited me perfectly. I’m pretty shy, to be honest, and it gave the vocalists the privacy to really open up,” says Trentemøller.Contributors include the aforementioned Sakura, acclaimed German-British singer Anika, Jonas Bjerre of former singer of Danish dream-rock trailblazers Mew, and Sune Rose Wagner of fellow Danish heavy indie hitters the Raveonettes and Colorado-originating Midwife (Madeline Johnston), whose self-coined “heaven metal” makes her one of contemporary shoegaze’s most singular and quietly revered figures. There’s also New Mexico dream-pop duo Tan Cologne and Danish singer-songwriter Emma Acs – the latter moving in the orbit of Copenhagen’s revered Posh Isolation scene and now singing in Trentemøller’s live band – who help create the soft/loud dynamics of the album’s lyrical layers, along with its many emotional states.On the subject of moods, German-British singer Anika brings cool-for-cats wisdom to the krautrocky Sprechgesang of “Johnny Boy”, a track about love and heartbreak, driven by live instrumentation and sprinkled with a catchy synth arpeggio. Most of the vocals on the album were recorded at home, helping to wrap each song in a blanket of honesty.Meanwhile, intentionally sequenced to provide a “break” for the listener, “To Mist” detaches itself from the confrontational energy felt elsewhere to luxuriate in lush ethereality, melodies shimmering like diamonds in the sun for a track about “changing form to be the intangible mist,” “Halved”, featuring Midwife, similarly slips into a nocturnal slow-burn, drifting through colder layers of nugaze ambience and reducing everything to fractals of fragile beauty.Then there’s “Terrified”, which splits the mood to pair stream-of-consciousness lyrics with optimistic singing from Bjerre. “I think sometimes when you dream about things that make you fearful and uneasy, it’s your mind trying to prepare you for any scenario, like you’re processing