The indie group from Czech Republic follow up a slew of releases with ‘Memory Fades,’ embarking on their biggest year yet
Claiming to play an allusive combination of solarpunk, synthwave, fuzz-pop, bedroom pop and good old fashioned indie rock, The Winter Sounds have ben chasing after their own sonic nirvana since 2007.
Their EP ‘Europa’ was tracked in the summer of ’23, with producer Derek Garten, and now they look to their fifth official release with ‘Jupiter,’ another EP releasing through Kitty Kant Collective.
‘Memory Fades’ offers insight on what to expect, and where the trio are taking their project next.
With ‘Jupiter’ said to be “an ambitious, cinematic concept album,” ‘Memory Fades’ marks the beginning of a new experimentation.
With frontman Patrick Keenan writing a thesis on ‘The Philosophy of Solarpunk,” the passion for this descriptor is clear.
‘Memory Fades’ is bright and cheerful, immediately reminiscent of a more positive The Postal Service.
Buoyant, dense with layers and lead by a strong and well pronounced vocal, ‘Memory Fades’ is a soothing dose of nostalgia.
The track itself feels like a memory plucked from behind one’s eyes, the colour slowly draining and the faces blurring while the feeling associated remains a tangible and textured lifeline to the past.
Like Bleachers merged with the experimental pop-punk heavy hitters of the late 2000s, ‘Memory Fades’ is energetic and bursting with life.
A collection of synths and spry electronic percussion (including what sounds to be Christmas bells on the quarter notes) blend nicely with thick bass and distant melodic guitars.
There’s a subtle epic quality to ‘Memory Fades’, feeling at once like the closing and the opening of something ephemeral.
The aim is to jump inside, when it is neither entirely shut nor gaping. Exisiting inside the song feels like exisiting inside the past and present simultaneously – a theory that could be argued as the truth of our human experience due to the huge role memory plays in our lives.
Though it may be fallible, our own humanness is constructed on experience, and the memory of said experience.
‘Memory Fades’ captures what makes the function of remembering and forgetting so beautiful, and yet so deeply tragic.
