The Bleak Assembly – We Become Strangers

Kimberly Kornmeier, vocalist of the American band Bow Ever Down, and Michael Smith, member of Fiction 8, a band that emerged in the early 90s and is also based in the United States, jointly release We Become Strangers, an EP that makes official the debut of the new darkwave duo The Bleak Assembly.

The sound of this project is oriented to darkwave and post-punk, however, we can observe in the development of the four tracks of this release, that the style of The Bleak Assembly is quite concrete, since it can remind us of famous bands like Siouxsie & the Banshees but, their sound is quite flexible, since if we listen to Slow Down Time and Wash It Away, the first two tracks of We Become Strangers, their sound is closer to genres such as post-punk or gothic rock, whereas in Fragile Like Glass and Lost and Vacant, the next two tracks, we can appreciate from the execution of the rhythm to the sound textures, an electronic environment that becomes even sharper in the fourth track.

Regarding the nature of “change” that inspired the EP, Michael Smith states, “if there’s a theme to this EP, it’s in recognizing how we’ve changed as artists and as people. What if you met your younger self and your younger self didn’t even recognize you? That’s what “We Become Strangers” is about. Kimberly goes on to say, “It’s “a strong feeling of being cut from the past”. It’s a little alienating but also very liberating.”

Release date: September 30, 2022.