The only new song we’ve heard from the Swedish indie-pop project Many Voices Speak since the release of 2018 debut album Tank Town was “Want It Kept,” a dreamy Beach-House-meets-bedroom-pop ballad released two years ago just before COVID shut the world down. All these months later, that song has been the opener on a new album called Gestures that’s dropping this spring.

Matilda Mård has announced the new LP today with the release of its second song, “Seat For Sadness,” a subtle stunner that reminds me of an especially shadowy Natalie Prass. She describes its genesis in this statement:

The verse of this song kind of came to me all at once. Then it took quite a long time until I got the rest of the song out of me. I lived in Berlin at the time and rented a piano room at a music school, and most of the hours spent in there I was searching for the rest of the song. It wasn’t until me and Petter Nygårdh had started recording the album back home in Sweden, that I came up with the melody that would become the chorus. The new chorus pushed us in a new direction by making the whole song require something more. We had only brought a small part of the home studio to a country house to escape the noise from the neighbour’s renovation, but we found an acoustic guitar in that house that ended up being an important part of “Seat For Sadness,” and later on an important part of the album as a whole.

Hear “Seat For Sadness” below.

TRACKLIST:

01 “Want It Kept”
02 “Seat For Sadness”
03 “Within Reach”
04 “Worthy”
05 “Phase Out”
06 “Nothing’s Gone”
07 “Assured”
08 “Visual Fields”

Gestures is out 4/29 on Strangers Candy. Pre-order it here.