Mother Tongues - Love in a Vicious Way (2023) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Mother Tongues, the Toronto-based band led by guitarist/vocalist Lukas Cheung and vocalist/bassist Charise Aragoza, today announced their debut album Love In a Vicious Way will be released on July 21st via Wavy Haze Records. Out now, the album’s lush lead single “A Heart Beating” is a goth dream-pop rocker to get lost in, sonically splitting the difference between Alvvays and The Cure. “A Heart Beating’ speaks to how we can find ourselves lost in the feedback loop of regrets and longing,” the band explains. “The chorus repeats like some hypnotic spell calling you back into your body.” The track is accompanied by a vivid, kaleidoscopic video directed by Carson Teal (James Blake, Tyga), featuring visual symbolism of the album’s themes as a heart devours itself, evolves into something shapeless, and ultimately disappears in atrophy. “It’s an exploration of the darker ways we love, the parts with teeth,” says Cheung, who co-produced the album alongside Asher Gould-Murtagh (Born Ruffians, Kali Horse), of its title. “It possesses you, it’s a pit you fall into. Love overtakes you, this record is about surrendering to that feeling.”

Mother Tongues’ reflective debut album is a carefully crafted cyber-psych opus that lurks between the cerebral and feral. At moments, precious and serene; in a blink, snarling, teeth razor-sharp. Its 10 songs about love, longing, desire, and identity are charged with a sincerity and teenage sentimentalism that captures a time when everything was crucial and felt tenfold. Love In A Vicious Way sees the band carving out a space for themselves: they are world-building. Joined by Kvesche Bijons-Ebacher (synths), Lane Halley (guitar), and Nick Kervin (drums)–who have played with artists like Lido Pimienta, Maylee Todd, and Zoon–Mother Tongues’ propensity for rich atmospherics and cinematic arrangements here reach stratospheric heights, riding thundering, totalizing waves of angsty alt-rock, interstellar psychedelia, dream-pop-noir, and touches of ‘90s breakbeat and electronica.

Love In A Vicious Way ultimately showcases a young band building a musical world that reflects their own unique experience, and extending an invitation to others. “We’re peering into the future and imagining what this world could be. It’s a little William Gibson, a little cyberpunk, it’s lit like a Wong-Kar-Wai film. It’s queer, it’s free, a little goth, everyone’s wearing eyeliner,” Cheung laughs. “I like to imagine our record bleeding out of the headphones of some 16-year-old in this not-so-distant universe.”

Tracklist:
01. A Heart Beating
02. Dance in the Dark
03. Only You (Reprise)
04. Love in a Vicious Way
05. Only You
06. Drip Drip
07. Luv 2 Liv
08. Ode to Jay
09. Worm Day
10. Lonely Ones


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