Guitar-pop artist and producer Brijs shares new single 'River Swimming', out August 20th

LISTEN TO ‘RIVER SWIMMING’ HERE

Following on from the release of his previously shared singles ‘Glitra’, ‘Velvet Ditch’ and  ‘Stay Up, Stephanie’, all lifted from his forthcoming debut album ‘Glitra’, guitar-pop artist and producer Brijs now returns to share the record’s fourth cut ‘River Swimming’, out August 20th.

‘River Swimming’ is a meandering, glittering psych-folk epic drenched in vocal harmonies, bubbling synths and distant harpsichord. The track dips and dives with hypnotic drums, Latin percussion and is concluded by a masterful kaleidoscopic guitar duel.

The song was conceived on a trip to a small village on the Charente River in France. Brijs and his band mates packed up a beaten up yellow Volvo Estate full of instruments and amps and drove 10 hours to an old farmhouse owned by a family friend. The following week was spent mostly barefoot, playing music, drinking cheap red wine and jumping off bridges into the river. They returned the following year with a group of ten.

‘River Swimming’ is the fourth single from Brijs’ debut album ‘Glitra’ written and recorded in a period where the artist quit his London job and left the city for a property guardianship of a dilapidated mansion Cecil Court in his rural hometown with a new group of friends. River swimming became a regular activity for the gang during the warmer months of those couple years. The song taps into the record's overarching theme of pursuit - the artist explains:

"That first trip to France was like jumping into a cool river on a summer's day after a long journey and washing off five years of stress, sweat and grime. Half swimming, half floating, I headed downstream away from the greyness and noise towards a sun-drenched peace somewhere in the distance. Those two years living at Cecil Court felt similar in a way."

‘GLITRA’

“Framing life in squares, we’re tied up in triangles...

We see the same pictures, we paint them in circles”

Inspired by a quip about the Bloomsbury arts collective, the final lyric of Glitra’s closing track frames the structure of Brijs’ debut album: four tracks about time and place, three on love and the title track about friendship.

Cecilian

Velvet Ditch

Stay Up Stephanie 

River Swimming

Shame

Comb

Mol y Sol

Glitra

Glitra, old norse for ‘glittered’, was supposedly used by the norsemen to describe the flickering reflection of sunlight on the horizon at sea. Brijs uses this image as metaphor for the underlying theme of pursuit that runs throughout the album. 

“Friendship, joy, trust, intimacy, understanding, identity are all like continually shifting points on the horizon - they are boundless in nature and therefore endlessly pursuable. That’s how I see that period of time… A mismatch gang in a crumbling old vessel, travelling towards our personal unknowns and at the same time, towards each other.”

The album was produced by Rob Brinkmann, long serving engineer of RAK Studios (Drake, Royal Blood, Pixies, Clean Bandit & Mumford and Sons) and mixed and mastered at Abbey Road by Oli Morgan (Bastille, Princess Nokia). The album also includes two collaborations with songwriter Ed Nash of Bombay Bicycle Club.

‘Glitra’ is Brijs’ first outing as an artist for some time, as a composer, you may have heard Brijs’ work on numerous award-winning film and TV projects for the BFI, BBC and Channel 4 including his most recent score for BFI short called ‘Stand Still’ which just won Best Short at the Link International Film Festival, as well as commissions for Mario Testino, Rankin, Kurt Geiger and Liu Jo. Album title track ‘Glitra’ was featured in a recent ad campaign for iconic US fashion brand Tommy Hilfiger. His talents as a songwriter and producer have also landed him upcoming collaborations with artists including Will Joseph Cook, Girli and Indian Askin. 

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