Milagres Add Layers to ‘Sunburn’ – Song Premiere
Brooklyn indie rock foursome Milagres return with a new studio album, Violent Light, on February 25th. Ahead of that disc – the follow-up to 2011’s highly praised Glowing Mouth – we premiere the stellar “Sunburn,” which evokes classic, synth-steered modern rock and highlights frontman Kyle Wilson’s hypnotic voice.
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“‘Sunburn’ was a tune that I started working on while we were touring for Glowing Mouth and puzzled over for a very long time,” Wilson tells Rolling Stone. “‘Sunburn’ is a very simple song, but it was one of the most difficult to write. Production-wise, this one was really a challenge. There were so many layers that we added in – a melodic Rhodes line, a flittering bass, a wobbly synth pad, a shimmery guitar, the unpredictable skittering electronic hi-hats that you hear a lot in hip hop production these days, live drums, electronic drums, more electronic drums, etc.
“Ultimately, we ended up with so much stuff that for the first time we had to produce a song by actually removing things as opposed to adding them,” Wilson continues. “It was interesting for us because we are so used to working the other way. We literally spent hours in front of the editing window, hashing out where each bass drum hit and each hi-hat roll should land, arguing our points until we were all sufficiently convinced. We deleted a lot of stuff and we ended up with ‘Sunburn’.”
Milagres – who also include Chris Brazee, Paul Payabyab and the album’s producer, Fraser McCulloch – have broadened their approach on Violent Light, employing a darker, harder sound than its predecessor while embracing a variety of styles, including dream pop (“Jeweled Cave”) and funk-inflected classic rock (“The Letterbomb”). The group has an active 2014 planned, including a slew of national dates that get underway in tandem with the release of Violent Light on February 25th at Great Scott in Allston, MA. That trek includes a performance on March 8th at Georgia’s Savannah Stopover Fest en route to SXSW, running until April 10th, when the band will play a homecoming show at the Bowery Ballroom.