The Swedish four-piece Shout Out Louds have announced their fifth record Ease My Mind, their first since 2013's Optica..
Ease My Mind was recorded in Stockholm over winter – multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Bebban Stenborg notes that it's "not the most obvious place to make sunset rock'… I suppose that’s the power of escapism."
"Ease My Mind celebrates music as a means of escape, a need to take a break from feeling petrified with fear," Olenius and Stenborg explain. "The world is a different place now than it was in the beginning of the 2000s. We didn’t grow up very aware of political messages in music and probably didn’t feel much of an urgent need to understand the world around us, in that sense. However, that has changed over the years. The world has seemed extremely dystopic and frail for quite a while now, and having children and getting older forces you to open your eyes to issues more devastating than heartbreak and feeling lost. But in our music, we still allow ourselves to address things the way we always have: through emotions rather than analysis. Ease My Mind is a lot about that for us."