专辑名称：Year of Romance
歌手名称：Liza Dries
发行时间：2025-03-28
发行公司：Intercept
Through the march of time, losing touch with others can become a sobering inevitability. How do you learn to accept this acute transience, and smile back at the reflection in the mirror again? Are you in fact moving forward… or are you running away?
These are pertinent questions Liza Dries has occupied herself with. Questions oddly fitting for the overall premise of “Year of Romance” the Germany-based, Dutch-born audiovisual artist’s inaugural recording project under the wings of Intercept Records (Coloray, Tsepo, Ineffekt). This collection of songs spins a fever dream where the Dries initially submits herself to a breakneck euphoria. The title ‘Year of Romance’ is what you call a red herring: which – after two stationary years mired in a global pandemic – is what the year 2023 was supposed to be. But life has a funny way of subverting expectations.
“After COVID, everyone had this urge to go wild,” Dries says. “At the same time, there was a kind of persistent cynicism in the news, where that urge existed alongside a rather bleak vision of the future. So with a group of friends we declared you can become your most corny and romantic self in 2023. That you can sit alone in some cafe with your notebook, that you can become the main character of your own movie. And give yourself permission to do things that are corny– where you hear that little voice in the back of your head telling you ‘you’re not allowed to do that.”
The first half of YOR, Dries makes an attempt to disregard that voice – conjuring a wide-eyed palette where the DNA of hyperpop, shoegaze, breakbeat, house and ambient music blissfully coalesce. It offers a snapshot of Dries allowing herself to get completely carried away – giddy in both sound and melody, building layer over layer to express this abundance of raw feeling. “Coloray, who mixed the record, was pretty much losing his mind,” Dries jokes. “Because he had to edit 90 to a 100 layers per song. I suppose for my next project I’m going to have to set a limit of how many layers I’m allowed to use."
On opener “Babybloom” arpeggiated vocals flutter around like rose petals inside of a raging cyclone. Dries gives herself permission to flirt with widescreen pop, the track’s big drop reduced to a tantalizing cliffhanger. Nevertheless, the bliss persists – albeit precariously – on “Happy Too”, Dries’s woozy, twisted version of Eurodance, where she finally allows herself that elusive – and decisively glorious – Ibiza-level drop. “This song was tricky, because it’s where I’m at the peak of my manic naivety;I followed whatever impulse presented itself to me. As if being on a skateboard or bungee jumping. I remember going by bike through Cologne, feeling so light, almost like flying over the streets. And it felt really good.”
When you catch yourself in the act of this empty-headed ecstasy, the first instinct is to question this completely. And Dries underpins her wry cynicism with a palpable sense of humor. “Basically it’s like walking down the street as a happy NPC in a simulated world , and the person is totally aware that this is not the truth. I was reminded of Westworld, like when you're a robot you begin to realize you're a robot. This rather cynical view of happiness.” Throughout YOR’s nebulous tapestries, Dries’s inner daydreamer and doom speller play a fickle game of chess.
The irresistible charm of YOR, however, lies in Dries never pretending to control the messy switch between rose-colored glasses to a slightly darker variety. It’s a sweeping woe-is-me journey of the winsome kind, evoked in both Dries’s witty lyricism and dazzling production smarts. The cosmic march of “Stay” samples Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, while the frenzied “NightCore” stubbornly injects jittery synths, even as the twilight starts to set in. On the pivotal track “So Ending” the glass of YOR’s ethereal snow globe universe starts to shatter, as piercing synth stabs interrupt its thunderous techno cadence.
On the reggaeton-inflected closing thrill-ride “Heavy Birds”, she gleefully samples wild parakeets, exotic birds who have grown as ersatz commoners in her neighborhood – which may or may not be a playful wink to her own periodic estrangement as a Dutch expat in Germany. Other samples were recorded at the heart of Los Angeles – a place where that aforementioned dichotomy between dreaming and doom spelling is often felt the deepest. “For me, these tracks are about going from a very happy time to quite a difficult time. And experiencing the consequences of having lived life very impulsively on that adrenaline.”
Dries flexes her dream pop muscles on the starry-eyed, bittersweet melancholia of “Heartbreak” – the moment where the first glitches of the matrix start to present themselves. The womb-like “Solaris” and the reflective “Underwater'' provide some silver linings along the way, as Dries seeks out a healthy equilibrium between the dream and the awakening. On YOR, we hear growth accumulated from life fleetingly lived in the faster lanes, emitting a long sigh of relief – and poking a little fun at your distorted previous self on the side.
“I think at the moment, time has shifted again and these songs have remained stuck in their frame,” Dries reflects back. “I personally feel the need for fragility and reality. Things that feel humanlike: tangible and grounded. So I’m trying to look reality in the eyes, and this record is a reflection of my tendency to dream away and dive into a self-made world. I’m trying to be more aware of deeply rooted branches in the past that inform my behavior in the present. A million little choices and occasions that led you to your beliefs and ways of being. Key moments in your life that could be forgotten by others within 10 minutes.”
01. Babybloom
02. Underwater
03. Happy Too
04. Nightcore
05. So Ending
06. Solaris
07. Stay
08. Heartbreak
09. Heavy Birds
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