Inner Tongue creates a delicate milieu of sound.” – CultureCollide
“gentle, tremulous, expressive and expansive” – Glide Magazine
“I decided to modify my musical focus temporarily by writing songs which could produce a melodic tension without vocals, but which featured the traits of forward-looking pop music.”- Inner Tongue
Inner Tongue has today unveiled a stunning live session video for ‘New York’, a track from his remarkable debut album Favours, out now Mount Silver Records / Caroline International. The session was filmed in an abandoned hotel outside of Vienna with director Tobias Pichler.
“In order to give every song its own vibe and mood we recorded at three different times of day, and ‘New York’ was filmed in the evening,” says Inner Tongue. “The setting was this old and very charming hall with a panoramic view over Lower Austria. As soon as we had all our instruments set up in that space, it was magical.”
The saxophone on ‘New York’ is played by Inner Tongue’s father, who also plays on the live session. “My Dad is a good saxophonist and late in 2017, when I spent some time back home, I asked my him to jam over a chord progression I was working on,” he explains. “The second take we recorded there ended up on the album version of ‘New York’. He also makes the ending part in this live version quite a special thing.”
With elements that at times recall James Blake, Childish Gambino and Frank Ocean, Favours boasts delicacy and astonishing depth. As well as that, Inner Tongue combines the lightness of touch that distinguishes Death Cab For Cutie, the heartfelt perfection found in Sohn’s sonic realms, and the intuition evident in Chet Faker. Artists including Mercury Prize nominated Ghostpoet, Everything Everything and German wunderkind Get Well Soon have invited Inner Tongue to support them on European tours.
The story behind Favours, and the reason it sounds the way it does, is a remarkable one. In 2013 Inner Tongue was diagnosed with a rare vocal-cord disorder so severe that only a handful of specialists throughout the entire world were capable of treating it. The resulting surgery left him, for a time, unable to talk. The months that followed his operation were emotionally and physically shattering, but he eventually began composing again. Singing was out of the question, “so I decided to modify my musical focus temporarily by writing songs which could produce a melodic tension without vocals, but which featured the traits of forward-looking pop music. It was as if someone had pressed a reset button on the musical identity I had of myself.”
