Fantôme, the duo comprising Hanin Elias, formerly of Atari Teenage Riot, and Marcel Zürcher of German industrialists Die Krupps, are readying their debut album, It All Makes Sense, for release on February 17 via Snowhite. It’s Elias’ first record since 2011’s solo LP Get It Back and finds the pair tapping a shoegaze-tinged electro-pop sound.
Elias has filled us in on the background of the band, which you can read below our first spin of ‘Scream’ from the album, and scroll down for the video for single ‘Love’:
"After working and touring with Atari Teenage Riot for over 10 years, I had the impression that I was neglecting my inner world in the sense that I was becoming more and more of a Riot Girl puppet, hiding behind this image of a hard, tough girl concerned only about politics and rage.
"I needed a balance and a need to write down my feelings and problems; the track ‘Scream’ is about feeling lonely and misunderstood in a relationship. It’s about yearning for a symbiotic moment that has no chance in a pragmatic stoic world.
"When I sent Marcel Zürcher (my Fantôme bandmate) the script of the song that I had pre-recorded he didn’t like it because it lacked structure, but that was also the essence of the song. We then gave the track another chance in Paris where we re-recorded it in a studio with David Husser and Paul Kendall.
"It is one of the most electronic sounding tracks if the new album and the more you listen to it the better it gets because of its lack of predictable structure.
"Fantôme is about all your hidden sides, the personal things that have to hide behind the superficial ‘oh so important’ big issues. In the end these emotions become like ghosts that hide in your dreams or keep you from growing and learning about yourself and others if you always push them away.
"Our influences were mainly the music that we listened to when we had our teenager hearts open wide – Siouxsie and the Banshees, all sorts of post punk, Leonard Cohen and shoe gaze.
"Partly it seems very pop and has a lot of pathos. I would say its epic sometimes. If people are solely only into ATR they may not like it because it touches a total different nerve."
