German Brazilian musician and visual artist Gloria de Oliveira has long moved through the kind of dreamy and ethereal worlds we love at HighClouds. In 2022, she joined forces with David Lynch’s longtime sound designer Dean Hurley for Oceans of Time, a sumptuous collection of symphonic ambient music filled with synths, strings and sensitivity. Blending spacey atmospheres, dreamy pop and touches of chilled out shoegaze, the album paired lush, expansive arrangements with de Oliveira’s luminous soprano, which drifted between French, German, Italian and English. Now, she is returning with her third album, The Lying Swans, due October 30 via La Double Vie.
Produced by Randall Dunn and recorded between Iceland, New York and Berlin, The Lying Swans finds beauty and tenderness emerging from the shadows of trauma. The album draws from Gothic fiction, German Romanticism, horror cinema and the Greek myth of Leda, while its sound brings together fantasy and Giallo scores, ancient folk traditions, bossa nova, MPB and Tropicália. Across its nine tracks, de Oliveira explores betrayal, fractured identity and the slow process of learning to trust your own perception again.
The journey begins with the majestic lead single “Fading Faces”, a beautifully vulnerable farewell to darker times that pairs shimmering synths with thunderous drums and glam rock guitars. “This is not only the first single, but also the very first piece of music I wrote when I started working on the album,” de Oliveira explains. Her self directed video takes the song’s dreamlike atmosphere to a mystical Brazilian beach, where she appears stranded between black cliffs and pink sand like a Pre Raphaelite water nymph. You can watch it below, and also stream “Fading Faces” in our Forecast Tape playlist, updated daily with the most notable new releases.
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