DARVID THOR RELEASES HIS DEBUT ALBUM ”IN THE SPACE YOU CARRY”
Gentle and tender indie rock artist DARVID THOR today unveils his debut album In The Space You Carry. Featuring singles ‘To Remember Yourself’, ‘Changing Shape’, ‘Be There’, ‘Garden’, and focus track ‘Back To’, In The Space You Carry is a catharsis from youth, a shedding of skin. Leaning into the cinematic and orchestral spaces within the indie and alternative music idiom, Darvid’s “absorbing, photosynthetic, warped, beautiful” (Triple J) music reminds us to slow down, take a breath, and take stock of what’s around us.
Carving out a new mood between the frayed crosshairs of orchestral indie, Darvid Thor’s debut album In The Space You Carry is a record conceived of and produced in a time of personal and temporal unbecoming. ITSYC holds it all. The stillness, the explosiveness, the catharsis, the farewell; ITSYC is the sound of the intimate conflict Darvid and his other selves reckoned with. Surprising vocal cadences accompanied by Darvid’s ever-lanky guitar work venture across his lyrics in startling and surreptitious ways; something his first release prementioned. ITSYC presents the intertidal zone between adolescence and adulthood; music breathing with growth and change.
Photos by Izzie Austin
The changes in ITSYC are startling, eccentric, and ecstatic. Darvid has unmoored himself from the prevailing indie paradigm and his previous, more synthesized pedigree. By fusing degrees of orchestral and cinematic arrangements, Darvid has created an album that is an extended overture to his body's emotional shifts. Phrases throughout speak to this yearning and progression as adulthood encourages him to become more cunning and extroverted with his arrangements. The Penny Quartet’s strings, Hudson Whitlock’s (Karate Boogaloo) drums, and the bands' distinct electric overlays combine for a medley of crescendos across the album, exploring life both in and out of the indie sphere, asking a question as to what else Darvid might have in store for us creatively.
Risk and authenticity bumps and breathes across In The Space You Carry. Something that can only come from improvising from your past; something that his beloved and long-term collaborators (which are many) grasped and delivered. Community is the binding agent in ITSYC. Co-produced with beloved friend, label mate, and band member Lewis Coleman, HudsonWhitlock, and debutant Nick Rhoder on string arrangements along with the stirring visual accompaniments by director and photographer Bridgette Winten, friendships both old and new, understanding where the energy of ITSYC needed to be taken.
The depth of sound was intimately engineered and mixed by Henry Jenkins (Karate Boogaloo, Surprise Chef), alongside Max Dowling on the master. It’s a connectedness that speaks to the community of creatives Darvid has grown up with and envisioned different parts of himself with, ITSYC being the latest emulation of a narrative that is only just beginning to thicken.
Darvid Thor’s solo project is one side of his prolific output as an artist, label founder, and collaborator. Growing up with a tight-knit group of musicians that formed The Cactus Channel in 2008, Darvid and his cohort built and developed a unique sound, process, and community, collectively contributing to over 50 releases since 2011. This family has grown to include beloved cinematic-soul group Karate Boogaloo, enigmatic art-rocker Lewis Coleman, the dreamy Winten, and the mysterious Pro-Teens. At the heart of his practice lies the establishment of Beloved Recordings (Rowena Wise, Lewis Coleman), an indie record label championing lyrically captivating and musically daring art-rock, indie-folk, and weirdo-pop. Finally, there’s Frollen Music Library, founded by Darvid and fellow Karate Boogaloo members to create analog soul and library music for producers, who recently placed a sample in ScHoolboy Q’s latest record, “Blue Lips”.
