- 2024-12-26
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MUSIC
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Neacal Releases Debut Album “Stranger from Long Ago”
Belgrade-based singer-songwriter Neacal released his debut album “Stranger from Long Ago” on October 11, 2024 via Neacal Music.
The album comprises 9 songs, featuring a guest appearance from American singer-songwriter Toby Driver. All songs were written and produced by Neacal.
Neacal has been working on the album for three years. He redefined his sound, crafting the songs as a means to navigate through trauma and reinvent his musical language.
The album is based on the orchestration, featuring amalgamation of computer-generated sounds with the live recordings of orchestral instruments.
Neacal said of the album, “These songs, while being unraveled over the course of the last 3 years, became a refuge in my darkest months. Loss of loved ones, loss of home, loss of the life as I knew it—all of this pain transformed into these lyrics and melodies. And now it's time for them to live their own life in this world.”- He continued, “'Stranger from Long Ago' is built heavily upon the orchestration, and sonic-wise I use an amalgamation of computer-generated sounds with the live recordings of orchestral instruments. I also tend to heavily load strings and woodwinds with the most important tasks of carrying the melody, the progression and the rhythm in most cases, whereas brass and percussion would mostly serve a supplementary purpose.”
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Neacal explained about some tracks for the album.
“The Bell”
“'The Bell' is a song of a then suppressed part of myself that came to recognise its own power. A fraction of me which I buried deep down and hadn’t been in contact with since the beginning of my cognition was slowly getting stronger throughout the period when this album was created… and the 'prison' holding this inmate started to slowly crumble. In [‘The Bell’], the prisoner explores the inevitable escape, and it realises its agency—it knows that the change that is to come will take place not just when the barrier is weak enough, but when the prisoner will apply the pressure as well, leading on the charge with other demons kept locked at the time.”
“Out of Control”
“This song was born during one of my most severe episodes of depression, but despite that fact, it's a hymn of hopefulness and acceptance. Here my suppressed part expresses its realisation that it is not going to dissolve into nothingness as previously expected, and that there's a chance it will gain life and freedom along the way. In 'Out of Control', it finds itself still lurking in the shadows, but now it inevitably crawls towards the light, even if that might be the light of an explosion. Things will get better, even if they might get worse before that happens.”
“Another Castle”
“Another Castle acts as a narrative centrepiece of the album, and speaks of the struggle of finding your own self and failing to do so at times. Its' chorus was conceived back when I still had my 'old' life, and I saw it through almost a year later in another place being another person, so in a way it bridges two radically different eras for me. So it felt natural to take its' second line and make it the title of the whole album.”
“Twice-Told Tale” featuring Toby Driver
“The very first song from this album that I wrote was ‘Twice-Told Tale’. Back in June 2021 I was terrible at singing, and thus decided to write to my most beloved modern musician Toby Driver, whose works I’ve been following for over 1,5 decades now. I asked if he might lend me his voice for this song to do it justice, and he agreed right away.”
“Monsters”
“As I wrote ‘Monsters’, after a while it was clear that it would work the best as a duet, so I found an Armenian singer with whom I recorded this song in Yerevan.”
“Unrest”
“'Unrest' is the culminating point of my upcoming debut album, where the emotional stakes are at their highest, and the drama peaks. Despite its sombre mood and underworld-themed imagery, this is not a song about embracing death, but about conquering it. And such victory may only come at a very high cost. For me personally this song was a harbinger of my inevitable mental meltdown, an internal collapse that had already begun by that time unbeknownst to me, and that took months to overcome.”
Photo by Matthieu Gill - source : Apple Music
