Dekker returns in 2024 with the brand new single “Popped The Top”, one of the featured highlights of his forthcoming album “Future Ghosts” (due 1st March 2024).
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With crystalline melodies, layered complexities, and lyrics that toe the line between cryptic and confessional, the latest single from Dekker ruminates on themes of addiction and potential. Hoping the track will take listeners on a journey and resonate deeply with those who have found themselves tangled in such issues, Dekker elaborates of “Popped The Top”:
“Do you ever talk to yourself? I do. That’s what this song is. Me to me. I hope this song resonates with a lot of people because that’s always a trip and a useful way for music be BUT when I sit down to write, I’m usually doing it for me first.”
While subdued and subtle in its nature, its underlying drive courses like a river towards a swelling chorus that bursts into life at the command of Dekker’s striking falsetto. “Popped The Top” is one of the finest and most stand-out moments of his keenly awaited upcoming album ‘Future Ghosts’ (out 1st March).
His third solo LP to date, Dekker’s latest work promises a textural ten-song effort steeped in love, loss, and life. Perhaps more melancholic and reflective than Dekker’s previous two albums, ‘Future Ghosts’ is nonetheless a record that marks a confident progression of his acoustic-driven sound and offers a collection laced with an innate sense of hope, curiosity, and suspense.
Speaking about how his new album came to form, Dekker says:
“After the completion of ‘I Won’t Be Your Foe’ in 2021, I knew I had done something special but that album was an exercise in writing an album that reflected more of how I WANTED things to be and feel. It was time to write something more reflective of how I WAS doing and what was going on with me more acutely.”
Written during that period of the 2020s where Covid was finally in retreat, but a whole new era of uncertainty was dawning, Dekker found himself consumed by a foreboding sense of mortality, family anxieties, and what the future may bring.
“I began writing this album when my daughter asked, “what happens to us when we die?” I told her that I didn’t exactly know and that we should begin searching together for an answer. It was at that moment that we wrote together what would become this album’s title track “Future Ghosts”. Somehow I knew I had just set a tone for the record; thoughtful, melancholic, not overly indulgent and with a little more of a lived-in feeling than my previous work” reflects Dekker.
While wrought from a deeply personal time of soul searching and self reflection for Dekker, the ten songs that comprise ‘Future Ghosts’ stand as some of the most universally human he has created to date. While many of the songs touch on the shared feelings of pain, loss, and disorientation we all feel, the record is not one that seeks to dwell on the morbid or sorrowful. Instead it is one that finds an artist embracing their purpose in life and how they influence our journey through it, as we grapple with its many mysteries.
“It’s about going through hard things and learning that you can do hard things” he adds. “In these songs you can also find something like faith and the kind of love that makes you do weird things.”
Reconnecting with his long-time collaborator Stefan Wittich (drummer/co-producer) at his Berlin studio in 2022, the pair began formulating his ideas for ‘Future Ghosts’. Writing and demoing his latest creations over an extended recording period, the process was slow at first. But patience is a virtue that soon began to pay in dividends as a series of sublime, subtle songs began to bloom into being. As Dekker relates:
“When we set up to record drums initially, it was a very basic four mic set-up. It was exciting to be limiting ourselves in this way and experimenting with sounds. Whilst I was trying different guitars and recording techniques Stefan was tweaking and adorning tracks with various percussive elements. I’m an impatient creator. I’m not one to sit and dwell on details and I don’t like waiting during the creative process. Saying that, there were long lived-in periods of months between many of the steps taken on this album - for very human reasons. I see now, that time did the album well and helped to provide the very lived-in feel I had hoped to achieve.”
Reaching out to Zach Hanson, who has offered his expertise to acts such as Bon Iver to The Staves, to Whitney, the studio talent added his distinctive sheen to the record with its final mixing and mastering.
‘Future Ghosts’ will feature the warmly received singles including “I Know, I Know”, “I Won’t”, “For Repair”, “Hero Myth” and “Too Young To Die”, plus new release “Popped The Top”. The album will be released on 1st March 2024.
American singer-songwriter Brookln Dekker, better known by his musical moniker Dekker and one half of the duo Rue Royale, has amassed a steadily growing global audience, international radio support and over 75 million streams to-date. Having released his debut album ‘Slow Reveal: Chapter One’ in 2020, Dekker returned with ‘I Won’t Be Your Foe’ in 2022, and will swiftly follow it with ‘Future Ghosts’ this March.
Along with his first spins on BBC 6 Music and a successful headline tour last year, demand in the UK for Dekker is soaring and he will return for a special release show at The Lexington in London on 1st March. Tickets are on sale now.
