Vera Sola shares video for new single ‘Bad Idea’

30.01.2024

VERA SOLA SHARES VIDEO FOR NEW SINGLE ‘BAD IDEA’

FIRST NEW ALBUM IN FIVE YEARS, PEACEMAKER, OUT 2 FEBRUARY VIA CITY SLANG

UK AND EUROPE TOUR BEGINS IN APRIL

“This is life, in all its wonder and terror”
8/10 Loud and Quiet

Watch the video for ‘Bad Idea’ here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ug-1Dof5U8

Vera Sola has today shared the video for new single ‘Bad Idea’, the final preview ahead of the release of her second album and first in five years, Peacemaker, which will be released on 2 February 2024 via City Slang. Singles shared so far also include ‘Desire Path‘, ‘The Line‘ and ‘I’m Lying‘. Late last year she also announced UK, European and US tour dates with full details below.

Speaking of ‘Bad Idea’ Vera Sola says:

“None of my songs are ever about just one thing. As much as this is a hymn on wildfire in California, it is a sorrow song for the destruction of the Amazon, it is a dirge inspired by the burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral, it is a metaphor for illicit relationships. To sum it all, it is a meditation on man’s short sightedness and generally fantastic ability to sacrifice the future for an ill-advised quick hit. ‘Take tomorrow out on loan,’ as I put it in the song.”

Peacemaker follows Vera Sola’s critically acclaimed 2018 debut Shades. Created in near-total isolation, when she finally decided to release it, it was the first time Vera Sola had ever let anyone hear her sing. It’s memorable artwork found her crouched in the corner of a derelict building and like the photograph on its cover, the recording found her voice layered, shrouded in shadow. Peacemaker blows out the walls of that room and surges across the grand American landscape it inhabits. Recorded predominantly in Nashville over the fall of 2019, Vera Sola, producer and orchestrator (alongside co-producer Kenneth Pattengale), opened herself up to the magic of collaboration to bring in dozens of musicians to embellish the sound. It marks a dramatic shift from the shadowy, enclosed nature of her first recordings, to a sweeping new sonic landscape and renewed focus on her remarkable voice.

The record is at times bold and orchestral while retaining some of the dirt and grit that was present under the fingernails of Shades, realising a whole world while managing to also find remarkable detail in snapshot vignettes. Influences range from New World Symphony – Antonín Dvořák’s exploration of American history and landscapes – to the rattling percussion and distorted guitar of 80s era Tom Waits. A collection of stories stitched together with that particular dreamlike quality which allows for disparate spaces to converge into a single scarcely knowable vastness, the lyrics are at times surreal, at others tender, unflinchingly bold and revealing or touching with jolts of everyday mundanity.Despite the ambition of the project, Peacemaker wasn’t intended to be years in the making but so it was. Loss, righteous anger, climate despair, illness and eventually radical acceptance seemed to domino over the years of creation.

In the most literal reading of the album’s title, here Vera Sola is the peacemaker, taking all that darkness – both personal and collective—and transmuting it through sound. But there are deeper, more complex meanings too. “The Colt Single Action Army…the Peace-maker…is the gun that quote-unquote tamed the American West”, Vera Sola says. “So it has this thematic resonance with the thrust of the record, as well as a personal significance to my family lineage of old west gun slingers. It’s the ultimate irony—not only in the sense of peace made violently, but also in that it’s this beautiful word that wraps around something horrible. It really gets to the complexity of the music. That complexity is important to me, that staring down and reintegrating of the shadow is important to me. It’s a reclamation”.

Photo credit: Ebru YildizHigh-res image can be found here

Pre-order Peacemaker here:
http://verasola.lnk.to/Peacemaker

Tour dates:

14 Feb – Brooklyn, NYC @ Public Records
22 Feb – Los Angeles, CA @ Gold Diggers
08 Apr – Dublin, IR @ The Workman’s Cellar

09 Apr – Glasgow @ The Hug & Pint
10 Apr – Manchester @ YES Basement
12 Apr – London @ Chats Palace
13 Apr – Bristol @ Louisiana

16 Apr – Berlin, DE @ LARK
18 Apr – Hamburg, DE @ Aalhaus
21 Apr – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso Upstairs
23 Apr – Antwerp, BE @ Rock Lobster
25 Apr – Paris, FR @ Pop Up
27 Apr – Nyon, CH @ La Parenthèse
29 Apr – Vienna, AT @ B72

Tickets are available here:
http://verasola.lnk.to/Tour