Erasure’s Vince Clarke has announced that he’ll be releasing his debut solo album, Songs of Silence, on November 17th via Mute. Along with the announcement, he has shared the album’s first single, “Limitations of Jeremiah.” Stream the song below.
Spanning 10 tracks, Songs of Silence will be an ambient instrumental album, forged by experimenting in the studio during the extended downtime of the pandemic. Clarke — whose compositions with Erasure and Depeche Mode have already earned him a place in the annals of pop history — began tapping into the possibilities of Eurorack, a modular synthesizer that can create a seemingly limitless number of sounds. The result was a flow of creativity that eventually blossomed into a full-fledged album.
Pre-orders for Songs of Silence are ongoing. See the artwork and full tracklist below.
“I could have gone on forever, I could have not stopped,” Clarke said of his creative method in a press statement. “I was enjoying the process so much and wasn’t thinking about anyone else hearing it. But hearing it develop in my studio, in my head, learning new tricks — that’s been the best thing about this. I was in a state of shock, actually, when Mute said they wanted to release this album.”
As shocked as he may have been, the album seems to be undeniably resonant. Listening to the lead single, “Limitations of Jeremiah,” it’s clear that Clarke has found a way to express a wide breadth of emotion through subtle musical maneuverings. A haunting cello, played by composer Reed Hays, dances above an airy drone, like a stream of thoughts floating through a heavy mood. For his part, Clarke described the tracks as “having a sense of sadness, of things going bad, things crumbling.” But in the act of capturing that “sense” in music and sharing it, Clarke has also made something hopeful, unifying in the human experience.
The single arrives with a music video directed by Ebru Yildiz, featuring pensive, black and white shots of Clarke in an old home, lost in thought as the shadows grow long. “When I first heard the song, I felt like it contained a whole lifetime within itself,” Yildiz said. “All of the drama and peace, anxiousness and calmness, tension and hope, and everything in between. I wanted the visuals to feel like all those extremes as well.” Watch the video below.
Last year, Erasure released their 19th studio album, Day-Glo (Based on a True Story). The band described it as “an alternative look at Vince and Andy’s world, something that could only have been created when the artists were confronted with circumstances that allowed a little introspection to create something entirely new.”
Meanwhile, Clarke’s former band Depeche Mode kick off the North American leg of their “Memento Mori” tour later this month. Get tickets here.
Songs of Silence Artwork:
Songs of Silence Tracklist:
01. Cathedral
02. White Rabbit
03. Passage
04. Imminent
05. Red Planet
06. The Lamentations of Jeremiah
07. Mitosis
08. Blackleg
09. Scarper
10. Last Transmission
