1589 intergalactic lovers by jens mollenvanger

Intergalactic Lovers unravel their latest album 'Exhale'

Tom Zonderman
© BRUZZ
24/10/2017

Intergalactic Lovers have taken a deep breath over the past few years and blown out Exhale, a vivacious record on which the guitars have been tightened up and Lara Chedraoui’s voice is as enchanting as ever.

Iceland
“Lessines is like Iceland on a shoestring,” singer Lara Chedraoui laughs. The group went to the Walloon village with its picturesque stone quarries to film the music video for “Between the Lines”, the first single from their recent, third album. The village also happens to be the birthplace of René Magritte.

“Our music video director, Jeff Bronder, knew the location. The idea of filling the video with references to Magritte only came later. Of course we knew his work, it is so iconic, but we have now penetrated his playful questioning of reality more deeply. He would have been a great friend of the Lovers.” “We are not complete surrealists,” bassist Raf De Mey nods, “but we do see something of ourselves in the humour with which Magritte looked at the world.”

Samurai
“Apart from (drummer) Brendan (Corbey), we are very bookish people,” Chedraoui says. “And we like to pass around the things that inspire us, like a virus spreading,” De Mey says. “The Life of Miyamoto Musashi was one of these little viruses. I bought it in Japan when we were performing there. Musashi was a legendary seventeenth-century samurai who renounced all earthly possessions and accepted every duel to the death. That is also how he painted: every brushstroke had to be exact. His life philosophy was a revelation.”

“Even before we had read the book, it was something we had practiced in making this record,” Chedraoui explains. “Taking a leap without overthinking things, but trusting that whatever we do is the right choice. Nah!”

Oh darkness
“Hello darkness, my old friend,” are the first words of the song “Fears”, exactly the same as the ones Paul Simon penned in 1963 when, standing in his bathroom with the lights switched off, “The Sound of Silence” came to him.

“I honestly did not know that when I wrote the song,” Chedraoui says. “I have no idea what Simon meant by it, but I was thinking about the darkness that you can never completely let go. Everyone has a shadow. Sometimes it hangs over your head and then it crushes you. Sometimes you manage to ignore it, and those are the moments when you think: I have everything under control. And then the beast gets back in your head. Fortunately, I am surrounded by angels like Raf, Brendan, and (guitarist) Maarten (Huygens), they teach me to negotiate the world.”

Kick box
Last summer, we wondered whether Intergalactic Lovers are boxing fanatics during their great set at Pukkelpop, in which Lara Chedraoui sauntered onto the stage in something that looked very much like a shiny boxing jacket.

“Ha ha, no. Actually that was an outfit that I pinched from Raf’s wardrobe,” the singer confesses. “A kimono from the 42|54 collection, Elodie Ouedraogo and Olivia Borlée’s clothing line. I used to kick box, between the ages of 19 and 23, but I think I am better at dealing with my rage and frustration in words. I’m not going to start hitting things! Actually, it was our first time at Pukkelpop, and we had been away for a while. I thought it was incredibly cool, and that’s why I wanted a special outfit: it’s my time to shine!”

1589 intergalactic lovers hoes by jens mollenvanger square
Exhale
“It’s a yoga album,” Raf De Mey laughs about Intergalactic Lovers’ third album. OK, in the candid explanation she just gave us, it does sound quite ethereal, Lara Chedraoui nods, but she thinks the record is much too tempestuous for yoga. In the music – the band convinced Pixies producer Gil Norton to come to Aalst and pushed the Feist influence to the background to make room for rough guitars – but especially in the lyrics.

“I can sometimes be very sad and angry about what’s going on in the world,” she says. “And then the two historians in the band tell me that it has never been good. [Laughs] The problem is that everything gets documented and communicated. People were sometimes thrown off towers in the Middle Ages, but the videos didn’t go viral on Facebook.”

That is the big difference: while Little Heavy Burdens, their last album, was about their own little troubles, now they are looking at the world around them in which “we see many people short-circuiting,” De Mey says. “It is crazy how fast you get steamrollered by everything these days,” Chedraoui says.

“Everything is so fucking hard, and I’m only 32. Sometimes I hear myself talk and I sound as though I am 80. [Laughs] Just think about all the stimuli that get thrown at you when you walk down the street. It sometimes makes me sick. When I’m stuck on an overcrowded train with hundreds of people, I hide under my headphones.”

“Inhaling and exhaling seems really easy,” Chedraoui says when we ask about the album’s title. “But when you panic, you start to hyperventilate and it becomes difficult to find your breath. When I look around, I see a lot of people who have great difficulty with exactly that: breathing freely.”

> Intergalactic Lovers. 02/11, 20.00, Ancienne Belgique, Brussels

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