Release date: March 3, 2023
Weval is a Dutch duo consisting of Harm Coolen and Merijn Scholte-Albers, who have been working since 2011. After releasing several successful singles, they were praised by music websites in 2016 with the album “Weval”. However, it was three years later in 2019 with their second full-length album “The Weight” that they reached the peak of artistic creativity and prosperity. Microhouse, electropop, and neo-psychedelia are the subgenres around which Weval’s music is formed and defined. Weval benefits from the dryness and repetitiveness of minimal-techno as much as it benefits from the good-phase melodies and funky basslines of house music.
“The Remember” album is no exception to this rule and is a collection of washed-out dance bangers and chatty pop-ballads, which create a unique listening experience that is thought-provoking due to the high elegance that Coolen and Albers have spent in designing the sounds and arranging the pieces and having fun with it. It is almost identical to any other work released by the Ninja Tune label.
The album starts with the track of the same title, “Remember”, which is typical indie-dance fun of these years and somewhat sets the mood and tone of the album. The second track, “Everything Went Well”, also remains on the same track. Of course, unlike the opening piece, whose dynamic and fluctuating bassline carries its glory, here the rhythm is more pounding and has a nod to the industrial synthpop of the nineties by Depeche Mode and Underworld. With “Losing Days”, we move away from the dancehall mood at the beginning of the album and are invited to a more inner journey. From the relentless ups and downs of the dreamy synth and the hypnotic and noisy rhythm to the warm, multi-layered vocals and saturated with small and large effects, all of them make one of the most beautiful moments of Weval’s career. The track “Where It All Leads” slightly reduces the heaviness and darkness of the previous track, but it still has a nostalgic and sad mood due to the lo-fi drumline and a short motif that repeats under a lot of textures.
After the excessively long moderated techno of “Don’t Lose Time”, in the only feature (collaboration) of the album, “Never Stay For Love”, which is also considered one of the outstanding singles of the album, we are faced with a fountain of songwriting skills of “Eefje de Visser”. De Visser’s well-processed vocals are supported by a simple yet groovy bassline. The components of the drum machine and live drums are amazingly paired with each other. Likewise, the brief and useful use of the guitar has made the second half of the song much more listenable.
Some pieces may be less memorable than others. For example, “I Saw You” is a vocalized and not very updated version of Aphex Twin’s works, or “Day After Day”, despite its fierce and lovely beat, does not step beyond what Röyksopp presented years ago. But still, each song is elegantly crafted like a piece of art. With intertwined layers that reveal new details with each listening experience.
In the end, Weval’s “Remember” is a well-crafted piece of electronic music that showcases the two artists’ talent for creating immersive and evocative soundscapes. A selection of mental journeys that are sometimes accompanied by a lot of banging and make the body move. An album that has something for everyone. Whether you’re looking for music to get lost in, whether you want to put it in the background and go about your daily routine, or whether you want to drink, dance, and have fun with it. However, you should remember that Weval has something to offer you.
