Korallreven's debut is sheer bliss in album form

An Album by Korallreven is very much that – it’s an album in the sense that these aren’t songs that should be listened to in a cherry picking fashion, downloading whichever ones take your fancy to listen on an ad-hoc basis. Sure, you can enjoy the tracks individually and they’ll serve as wonderful nuggets, a reminder to you that Korallreven are an incredible band capable of vital, life-affirming music. But An Album needs – demands – to be listened to as one whole musical experience to fully appreciate the genius at work.

Korallreven is Marcus Joons and Daniel Tjäder (of The Radio Dept.) and following the three mixtapes of A Dream by Korallreven, Another Dream and A Dream Within a Dream that combined the likes of Britney Spears, jj, Ciara, SALEM and Justin Bieber to ludicrously brilliant effect, we finally arrive at their own debut album. It’s been well over two years in the making and sees the duo achieving the dreams of Joons, first realised on the South Pacific Island of Samoa. He wanted his music to be like the local Catholic Church choirs: spiritual, hypnotic and channelling the power of nature, transporting you to somewhere other than this world. And you can hear exactly this on second track ‘Sa Sa Samoa’, which features a guest appearance from Julianna Barwick, another artist who specialises in the secular spiritual. Her multi-tracked and looped vocals, like a bodiless choir, ease in the song before slightly tribal drums and a variety of sounds – including a metronomic, head-bobbing cymbal – take over and point to the dancefloor. Once the sampled Samoan choir soars through, euphoria is reached and you know exactly what Joons, and Tjäder, clearly a kindred spirit, were aiming for. It’s a kind of heaven on earth, a contented blissful state; lush tribal pop – yet so much more than that.

If we return to opening track ‘As Young As Yesterday’, featuring Victoria Bergsman of Taken By Trees, we get a better understanding of why An Album should be listened to as one musical movement. Built around vocal loops of the band and Bergsman, wonderfully poppy clap tracks and a myriad of synth washes, it’s verging on euphoric house at times thanks to the uplifting piano breaks. Bergsman sings “sa sa Samoa” linking it to the next song on the record, tying the tracks together. What Korallreven seem to want you to do is experience the same as they went through to make the album, and what better way to do that than to immerse yourself in that world.

Further moments of bliss appear via ‘The Truest Faith’, in which an acoustic strum is transformed into tropical Balearic pop, layered to astonishing levels of intricacy without losing its accessibility or pop sensibilities. ‘Keep Your Eyes Shut’ returns to the Inception-inspired world of mixtape number two with the recurring chant of “a dream within a dream”, trumpets parping gently across this slower number, providing a brief comedown before the stunning ‘Loved-Up’. Skipping along on percussion and Bergsman’s barely-there vocal; everything is drenched in a rapturous shower of shimmering synths that you think are about to peak at any moment. They don’t quite do so, because that wouldn’t fit with the flow of the record. Instead, we segue into ‘Comin’ Closer’, an almost R&B jam with vocals that bring it close to fellow Swedes The Tough Alliance.

If I could pinpoint a moment that brings together the dreampop world that Joons must have imagined under that coconut tree on Samoa, it’s the tranquillity of ‘Pago Pago’ with its plucked strings and woodwind that sparkles and dissolves into ‘Honey Mine’. The latter is the great lost summer holiday single – steeped in longing – which Saint Etienne never released; it’s been in existence for two years and time has not diminished its Balearic beauty. In fact, in an album context you can see how the build of ‘Pago Pago’ feeds into ‘Honey Mine’ and back out to the comedown of ‘A Surf on Endorphins’. It’s all about flow, and being carried along on the chilled wave that Korallreven create. The layers of sound that Joons and Tjader place on each of these songs is incredible; there’s so much going on each track, but it never feels crowded. If anything the duo creates space, allowing the songs to breathe, letting us experience the sea breeze and sunshine that Joons had on Samoa.

An Album ends on ‘Comin’ Down’, a slow and sad outtro, and an encapsulation of everything that’s wonderful about Korallreven and their record. Utterly in thrall to nature, we hear the sounds of that Pacific island – bird noises, the burble of water – set to blissful harmony. Soft percussion, gentle woodwind and the dreamiest of electro combine creating a hazy post-dreamlike state, as if we’ve woken up from the greatest holiday romance that there’s ever been; left with an unreal feeling, like music this beautiful and engaging doesn’t belong to this world. And that returns us to the formation of the band, and the aim to create music as moving and as spiritual as the choirs of Samoa.

Korallreven have created, with An Album¸ a piece of music that is, in turns, spiritual, hypnotic, dreamy and beautiful. As much as it’s a record of electronic pop music, it’s so much more and speaks to us about life, love, dreams and ambitions.