Berlin-based, Swiss singer, multi-instrumentalist and film composer Sophie Hunger announces details for a string of 5 UK headline tour dates for April 2021, including London’s Colours on April 21. The dates will showcase Hunger’s critically acclaimed new album ‘Halluzinationen’ (out now via Caroline International) – today’s 6Music Album Of The Day, streaming on all platforms. Featuring 6Music playlisted single ‘Alpha Venom’, the album is produced by Speedy Wunderground’s Dan Carey (Kate Tempest, Fontaines DC). Sophie has recently released the latest two episodes in a series of live performance videos, recorded during lockdown ‘Finde Mich’ and ‘Bad Medication’. Tickets to the five UK tour dates will be on sale from 10am on September 11, 2020.
Her second collaboration with Carey, for ‘Halluzinationen’ Sophie decamped from his Speedy Wunderground studios (where the pair cut 2018’s ‘Molecules’) to Abbey Road’s Studio 2. The album was captured there in continuous live takes, recorded just six times over the course of two days – an approach Hunger identifies as ‘Full risk’. ‘Halluzinationen’ is suffused with the nervous energy of its creation, and the tension is right there on the Krautrock-ing ‘Alpha Venom’, with whip-crack jolts from electronics programmed by Carey (also a member of the studio band heard across the album).
Sophie’s un-showy but barbed guitar work populates the spiralling outro to the album’s title track, one of a handful of songs on which Sophie sings in German. Following five albums whose lyrics spanned French, Swiss-German and English – multilingualism the product of a childhood spent shuttling between various parts of Europe – ‘Molecules’ marked Hunger’s first entirely English album. Whilst ‘Halluzinationen’ is a partial return to her roots, none of her customary intensity is lost in the translation.
Largely written in Hunger’s apartment using the equipment to hand in her kitchen-come-studio, ’Halluzinationen’ has a fevered quality, shaped in part by Berlin’s nocturnal world. The emotionally resonant ‘Maria Magdalena’ was written for a sex worker who frequents the Oranienplatz square where Hunger lives. Magdalena’s presence also inhabits album-opener ‘Liquid Air’, inspired by an illegal oyster bar which used to run out of the basement of Hunger’s apartment building, which both Sophie & Magdalena used to frequent; “You could only enter if you passed an alcohol test indicating a blood alcohol level of more than 0.2 percent. I used to go there when I was writing Halluzinationen.”
Elsewhere, the album draws from eclectic source material including complex mirages (‘Bad Medication’), the artwork of David Shrigley (‘Everything Is Good’) and Switzerland’s allegorical female national figure, Helvetia (‘Finde Mich’). It’s all drawn together with the sparing ease of a whip smart artist who has moonlighted for several years now writing columns for German papers Die Zeit and Der Spiegel.
Hunger’s seven albums to date have accrued over a quarter of a million sales, comparisons to Sharon Van Etten and PJ Harvey, and fans as wide-ranging as Lauren Laverne, Steven Wilson (on whose UK Top 3 album she appears) and footballing legend Eric Cantona (a long-standing fan, who guested on ‘Supermoon’). Sophie made her Glastonbury debut as the first Swiss artist to ever play the festival, and 2016 saw Hunger also make her first outing in film scoring, with her soundtrack for Oscar & Golden Globe-nominated Ma Vie de Courgette earning her a Cesar nomination to boot.
LIVE 2021
16 April GLASGOW Hug & Pint
17 April MANCHESTER Yes (Basement)
20 April BIRMINGHAM Dead Wax
21 April LONDON Colours
22 April BRISTOL Rough Trade
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
