El Perro del Mar signs to City Slang and announces forthcoming album, Big Anonymous

Today’s announcement is accompanied by the brand-new single, “In Silence”, which serves as a seamless introduction to the themes of grief, loss, mortality and darkness that intricately weave through the soul of Big Anonymous.

“As the feelings of grief and loss wear off, you enter another realm of guilt. The guilt of not mourning enough, of going on living though someone’s gone. This song is about the ghost not accepting that it’s dead," says El Perro del Mar. "I realised I was actually thinking like this which made it increasingly difficult to move on. I’d stayed on with the dead. I think it’s a common thing and it’s such a dark place to be in. You can’t really reason with the dead. That’s something I’ve come to understand.”

These themes are reflected in the accompanying visual, which is lifted from a short art/horror film, written by El Perro del Mar, longtime collaborator, stylist and art director Nicole Walker and photographer Joseph Kadow.

Big Anonymous is the eighth album released by Assbring under the El Perro del Mar moniker, following on from KoKoro, which was released in 2016. Since then, she has been name-checked by David Bowie and toured internationally with the likes of Lykke Li, José González, Taken by Trees and TV on the Radio.

The album embraces the existential and was born out of a commission from Dramaten, Stockholm’s historic Royal Dramatic Theatre. Assbring was given a choreographer and two dancers from the Royal Opera and allowed a free hand to stage a performance concert back in 2019. Recorded in a former torpedo factory on the central Stockholm Island of Skeppsholmen, the tracks emerged in collaboration with Jacob Haage (her longtime partner and key musical collaborator) and Petter Granberg.

The resulting ten tracks saw Assbring pushing herself to the deepest, darkest places. Having lost too many family members over the years, she began to realise that she was haunted by a grief that wouldn’t go away. She felt guilt at being alive when others weren’t and was dogged by a sense of her own mortality. With Big Anonymous she goes places where few choose to venture in public; dialogues with the dead, musings on her own mortality, reflections on the inner darkness that she inherited.

Tracklist:

1. Underworld
2. Suburban Dreams
3. Cold Dark Pond
4. In Silence
5. The Truth the Dead Know
6. Between You and Me Nothing
7. Please Stay (Anonymous Version)
8. One More Time
9. Wipe Me Off This Earth
10. Kiss of Death