STRFKR Surprise Releases New Synth-Pop Album 'Ambient 1'

[Cover photo credit to Coco Foto]

STRFKR released Being No One, Going Nowhere in 2016, then after that quiet period recently dropped Future Past Life, but only a few months later, they've decided to do a surprise release of their next effort, Ambient 1.

Ambient 1 is nearly an hour long and "drifts through softly glowing electronic instrumentals that extract the synth core from the group’s well established synth pop sound". The album can be previewed as a stream on Youtube as of midnight on the date of their surprise release.

STRFKR’s principal songwriter Josh Hodges was inspired to get this album moving after returning repeatedly to albums by his favorite ambient artists and minimal composers.

According to the label, this happened "in correlation with stumbling into a wealth of new age cassettes at an estate sale and a time in Joshua Tree spent excitedly experimenting with a friend’s vintage Prophet 5 synthesizer". The experiments helped Hodges deal with the "difficult emotions" of our times.

As the title of the album suggests, though, there are no vocals and no traditional song structures. You can hear more about the inspirations behind the album here on Bandcamp.