Long haired lovers Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin are the Californian duo getting everyone warmed up for sunnier times with their romantic, nostalgic summer anthems.
College sweethearts Brian and Madeline spent their early adulthood studying film, unsure about dedicating the rest of their lives to carving out a decent wage. Preoccupied with the obscure and with tastes spanning musical genres, the pair invested most of their time hanging out downtown, in local record shops, scoping out new tracks and rummaging for tunes from generations past.Obsessed with weird cults and bizarre subcultures, the couple forged a mutual interest in merging imagination and sound. Chatting about their processes Brian remembers, “it was just a fad thing for us, a fascination. We were reading non-stop about cults and watching shows around the time that we were making music; we have a lot of those weird fleeting infatuations. When we we’re making the songs we heard all these weird speaking samples so we just went back and dropped those into the songs.” The results were a magical amalgamation of hazy, wistful choruses interspersed with layered spoken scripts from their chosen ‘cult’ films.
Taking to Bandcamp, putting out tracks for their friends’ pleasure, the response to the music was massive. Initially releasing their debut single ‘Go Outside’ via US label Forest Family, the limited edition series of LPs sold out immediately and the band’s fans were left begging for more. Setting the world of music blogs on fire with their good mannered, laid back attitude, Sony’s latest undercover project – Lily Allen’s record label – snapped the pair up and brought them back into the studio to work on the forthcoming album. Picture the dream sequence in Labyrinth and this will give you some indication of the imagery Cults’ music references. Cascading, decadent guitar riffs are littered by slow tempo drum beats, then delicately finished with Madeline’s mesmeric vocals.
International interest has followed fast, with MTV releasing a video homage to the track released exclusively in the US, created by a team of emerging film directors, actors and artists, including Dave Franco and Emma Roberts. Chatting about everything from the Spice Girls to Sonic Youth; Blink 182 to New Order; scaling the back catlogues of Shangri-la and forthcoming releases from the Smith Westerns, i-D Online caught up with the San Diego based musicians for a spot of record shopping down Rough Trade.
Soothe your ears with more melodiousness from Cults here.
