A Ritual Sea launch their self-titled debut album today through Parisian post-punk record label, Icy Cold Records complete with a livestream performance from their YouTube channel at 8pm tonight featuring album tracks engineered by Daniel Fox (Girl Band) at Sonic Studios.
Their debut album explores themes of love, adversity and the personal experiences of singer/songwriter Donna McCabe and composer/guitarist Florian Chombart in their relationship as both a couple and bandmates. They focused on completing the record during the first lockdown, working with Paris-based musician and sound engineer Nicolas Subreìchicot (Vagabond, Lou Doillon) and they also received arts council funding via the Dept. of Culture and Tourism to help promote it.
Donna had this to say about the record: “It’s quite a strange thing, really, to meet someone online and then fall in love. But that is the truth of what happened, at the start. We met on MySpace, both in our own bands, liked each other’s music, both in other relationships. We talked for months, quite platonically. Bands broke up, relationships broke up. I kept coming back to this one song he had made ‘Haircut the Grass’ and couldn’t leave it alone for some reason. I went over to Paris to see him, and we’ve been together since.”
“That was 12 years ago. Music is literally the fabric of who we are and how we came to be together. All we wanted to do with this body of songs, some of which are five, six years old, was to create a world the listener would feel the emotions we were trying to convey, and wrap them in something cinematic, bring them deeply into another place, away from reality.”
Photo by Kieran Sheridan
