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The Forever Now (Denmark) – Lover’s City (ft. Trine Lyngvig) (single)

One of things that endears me to this job, even when its 8:30 pm and it’s still 30 degrees here in the ‘study’, is finding gems like this from bands I should have heard of, but hadn’t.

The Forever Now is a Copenhagen-based band focused on the wonderfully named Canadian/Filipino Montgomery de Luna who is joined here by the Odense-based singer-songwriter Trine Lyngvig. I don’t believe his output is high, but the quality is. The song is introduced in their media release with this idea – “Some people get on the train–others are still standing at the station.”

That sounds like a concept somewhere between an Einstein equation floating on the edge of the Theory of Relativity and a storyboard from ‘Brief Encounter,’ and on closer inspection it does relate to those that pass each other by in the night and meet all too momentarily, possibly for the only time.

But it’s the way he does it. There’s nothing sentimental about it, never mind soppy. There are some songs that seem to have been written for the big screen or the final episode of a long-running TV drama and this is one of them, with sections that could have been penned for different parts of a film, building towards a grand barnstorming finale.

It reminds me of the poignant final moments of the early 2000s British TV series Love Soup in which two people who would have made a perfect match but never quite managed to meet each other throughout the series were sat close by, separated by a only a couple of rows, at a theatrical farce, both looking as miserable as sin as the rest of the audience roared with laughter at every puerile joke and incident coming from the stage. ‘Lover’s City’ would have nailed that ending musically and especially the repeated line “Just let me fade away.”

The two harmonise exceptionally well and you can well understand why she’s regarded as Denmark’s Lana Del Rey but the big takeaway is how well he blends dream pop, synth-pop, a power ballad and an anthem into a magical genre-bender.

The only tiny reservation I have is that perhaps it peaks just a little too early leaving it with nowhere to go but then other artists do that and manage to draw a song out successfully, including M83, with whom I think it’s quite reasonable to draw a comparison with The Forever Now.

Mixing here by the way comes courtesy of Peter Katis , the producer for, inter alia The National, Interpol, and Death Cab for Cutie), and the quality shines through again.

An artist I’ll be keeping an eye out for in the future for sure. Forever and ever. Amen.

Find The Forever Now on:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soundsof.theforevernow/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.forever.now/

Photo credit: Diego Alonso.

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