Heartbreaking Bravery

Editor’s Note: There’s been a month-long gap in coverage, thanks to near-incessant travel and other extenuating circumstances. The following run of posts that contain this note will be posts that should have appeared sometime within the past several weeks. Use these posts as an opportunity to catch up to the present release cycle or to simply discover some new music. Either way, enjoy.

Nano Kino, a project led by Duncan Lloyd (Maximo Park, Decade In Exile) and Sarah Suri, have been of interest to this site since their very first recordings. The project has been capitalizing on their promise for well over a year now, with each successive release standing as a new career high. Surfing On the Void continues that trend with no shortage of finesse.

From the opening seconds of the title track alone, it’s clear that the band’s managed to find a new level of confidence and have fully committed to making something genuinely memorable. Falling even closer to the current field of extraordinary powerpop that’s currently emerging from Sweden, “Surfing On the Void” — the band’s finest track to date — also finds Nano Kino embracing their sunniest pop sensibilities to startling effect.

While the band hasn’t completely abandoned the stormy atmospherics that informed decent stretches of their past output, they’ve managed to integrate their formidable penchant for enthralling dynamics into what appears to be a new era of the band with an astonishing amount of natural ease. Everything in Surfing On the Void fits together neatly and is capped off intriguingly by the short acoustic closer,  “New Love”, which seems to be pointing towards a very fascinating future for the project. Whatever’s on the horizon is shaping up to be well worth our attention. 

Listen to Surfing on the Void below and pick up a digital copy here.