Luke Younger AKA Helm is to release new album Chemical Flowers via the PAN label this spring.
What’s described as his "most concise and direct record to date" will come out via PAN on May 17, and will be followed by his appearance alongside Gazelle Twin at the recently-announced People’s Forest Epping Forest celebration in London.
You can listen to lead track ‘I Knew You Would Respond’ above. It features a string part recorded by a quartet recruited by J.G. Thirlwell, with Luke Younger saying of them, "The inclusion of strings came from a desire to broaden the instrumentation and introduce a human element to build a bit more emotional depth in the sound. My intention was not to use strings in a ‘neo-classical’ way but instead make something that felt a bit darker, dynamic and in the case of ‘I Knew You Would Respond’ particularly, even psychedelic."
Fittingly for Helm’s appearance at the Epping Forest festival, Chemical Flowers was recorded in remote parts of the Essex countryside. "I would go and spend consecutive days / nights working in an environment which didn’t leave any room for outside interruption, so there was little else to do but throw myself into the process of creating the music," says Younger.
Speaking about the themes of the album, he adds, "Regarding the tone of the record, maybe it’s a subconscious result of our current climate but on the whole it feels quite bleak and tracks like ‘I Knew You Would Respond’ perhaps signal a form of escapism within the narrative. However, there are moments of hope in there and I feel the strings came to reflect that. Particularly in the second half of the record where I tried to build a bit more emotional resonance towards the end."
