ALEXANDRA LOST Release Highly Anticipated Album, Smoke
Alexandra Lost, the genre-defying musical force has released their album, Smoke, via Disques Dure Vie.
Expertly combining Simon’s work as a beatmaker and Jane’s work as a singer-songwriter, Smoke is a bilingual offering that sits at a crossroads between the worlds of trip-hop, r&b, and folk, between French and English Canada, and somewhere between facing life’s darkest moments and rising up above them.
Faced with the loss of Simon’s father, fertility struggles, and a miscarriage, the pair were in deep need of catharsis when it came time to sit down and write their third album. Having witnessed the promise of life flirting with the certainty of death, the duo became immersed in a wave of inspiration. They holed up at a friend’s house alongside the majestic Saguenay Fjord and began juxtaposing luminous sound collages with tense breakbeats inspired by the pioneers of British trip-hop. The resulting songs have a somewhat distilled quality, as they explore the transience of life and survival in the face of adversity, like flames rising up through obscurity. This symbolism came to inspire both the songs and the album’s title, and the spiritual fluctuation between life and death is aptly illustrated by Chanterel Gagnon’s cover painting.
The album’s titular track, “Smoke”, elegantly sets the tone for Alexandra Lost’s third album of the same name with its remarkable mix of ice-cold trip-hop and mellowed-out r&b. Jane describes the song’s genesis:
“At the time, life was repeatedly showing us how pretty much everything is impermanent. There had been a series of house fires in our village and we got to thinking about how smoke is kind of a bridge between something existing and it disappearing.”
Alexandra Lost occupies these liminal spaces quite comfortably, adding a touch of subversiveness with an open invitation to “be the crack in the wall”.
First off, care to introduce yourself to our readers?
We are Alexandra Lost. We are from Quebec, we are a real-life couple and we write songs together. We think of it as trip-hop music, but it’s also got elements from psychedelic and rock music, and the writing is definitely influenced by folk music and poetry.
Tell us a bit about your recent release.
Smoke is our third album. Starting from the most minimal musical elements, we try to extract the absolute most from them in order to create fully-fledged songs. It’s a process we’ve been engaged in since our first album, but we feel it really crystallized on this one. Lyrically, the themes of loss, resilience, and transcendence are pretty prevalent on the album. So to fit with that, we set ourselves up with this idea that the music should feel like you’re in some kind of an altered state.
How do you typically go about the songwriting process? Do you have a specific method or creative routine that you follow?
For this record, we started off by writing demos for four days straight in a rented house in Quebec’s Saguenay region. That’s what set off the whole thing. We find that we need outside triggers like trips, or hiding in the woods for a while in order for ideas to come up. After those initial writing sessions, we worked mostly from our home.
It’s interesting that we’re two individual songwriters in the group and we both have our own individual methods. But we’ve also developed ways of co-writing and collaborating together. Simon tends to work from the bottom up, developing the bass and drum groove first. Jane has more of a top-down tendency, where a lyrical or melodic idea drives the rest of the composition. Once we’ve come up with an initial idea for a song, we do lots of back and forths with one another in order to flesh things out into a fully developed song.
Looking ahead, what are your plans for supporting this new release? Are there any upcoming tours, music videos, or additional content that fans can look forward to in connection with this project?
We made two videos for the songs “Orange” and “Le monde en feu” and we are pretty proud of them. Just like the songs themselves, we edited them starting out from very little material. The results surprised us and they just felt “right”.
We’ll be playing album release shows in Quebec City on April 19 and in Montreal on April 20.
Looking back on your musical career, is there a particular moment or accomplishment that you consider a turning point or a highlight?
We are very grateful for every opportunity we have to release and to play music. It might sound cheesy, but for us, the album “Smoke” is definitely our greatest accomplishment.
Last but not least, it’s time to pay it forward, what upcoming band or artist would you recommend your fans check out?
Pied Léger, Thierry Larose, Jonathan Personne from Corridor, Ariane Roy, Violett Pi, Blaze Velluto Collection, Saints Martyrs…just to name a few of the amazing acts in Quebec!