Description
Label Review.
2017 album.
Our Overview.
Following on from the three-piece’s self-titled debut in 2015, the Liverpool-based All We Are return with their second album ‘Sunny Hills’. Coming together as students at Liverpool’s Institute For Performing Arts in 2011, the trio are made up of Guro Gikling (Norway), Luis Santos from Brazil (guitars) and Richard O’Flynn from Ireland (drums). After spending much of 2015 touring and honing their sound further the band started to write new material with a new sense of urgency and power, songs that documented the emotional rollercoaster the trio have been on in the past two years.
Where 2015’s ‘All We Are’ was funky, liquid, seamless, ‘Sunny Hills’ has a wobble to it, a human heartbeat and a grit that reflects the energy of the band’s thrilling live shows. The idea of displacement as well as notions of personal struggle, despair and hope started pouring out in the writing process and the result is an album shot through with struggle but pulsing with a spirit of resistance and joy. Inevitably, the city of Liverpool itself affected the album.
Although a political LP, Sunny Hills is designed to offer hope and moments of pure joy. The trio explain how the art mirrors these ideas: "it shows an old house sandwiched between two large buildings under development. The woman who owned the house refused to sell to a number of developers including Donald Trump. She resisted for years while the developers even bought the space above the house. She finally won the case and stayed there for a further decade until her death. Before that, she watched Donald Trump’s casino fail and close its doors. There is a feeling of powerful resistance in this story that we relate to along with a real sense of defiance and eventual victory against a bigger power."
Sunny Hills’ is an irresistibly danceable, dark yet uplifting record about what it means to be alive right now and the power of friendship and togetherness in a world intent on driving us apart. Produced by Kwes (Solange, Kano, Loyle Carner).