Rat & Co release new single ‘Soldiers’
Rat & Co are back to grace our ears with their sonorous cinematic single ‘Soldiers’ featuring Liahona. The ambient eccentrics have crafted a deeply brooding cut of downtempo audible atmospherics.
With an intro reminiscent of Boards Of Canada’s early work, the scene is set with a yawning expanse of eternal space haunted by garbled radio samples, that are slowly cracked open by a rising laid back breakbeat. We can easily envisage the dystopian world that Rat & Co. paint with this track, wondering Soldiers wandering across a post-apocalyptic environment, “hopeless” and “homeless”. The drums almost mirror the reparative movement of feet, marching against the crossfire of sporadic arpeggiated synths, whilst being bombarded by massive groaning pads.
Rat & Co explain that “Soldiers is a story of a hopeless war near the end of human civilization. A war to end all wars, and everything else surrounding it. Mindless Soldiers spread across the land fighting to just stay alive for a cause that nobody knows. They are broken and nothing can fix them.”
Fellow Australian singer Liahona lends her ethereal tones, barley articulating the lyrics she utters as her perfect vocal range conveys a lamenting tale that is both direct and fascinatingly interpretable. Her vocals sound restrained, whilst at the same time a yearning desperation is felt as she calls out for the rootless soldiers. With her voice added to the fray, ‘Soldiers’ begins to feel as though Liahona is leading a congregation of mournful synthesisers in a haunting sermon, and we listening from inside the rafters of a Cathedral.
The space and emotion that Rat & Co consistently deliver in their work, is breath taking. They have already attracted wide-ranging support from Mixmag, Noisey and Red Bull, bolstered by support slots on both Tycho and Chet Faker’s Australian tours. Their music takes you on a journey though different cultures
‘Soldiers’ is another glimpse into the world of Rat & Co, somewhere between consciousness and brooding slumber, a place where a permanent, lucid veil offers only snatched glances of a dystopian future only known to them.
