Choir Of Young Believers This Is For The White In Your Eyes Out Tuesday, August 18
Bio: When listening to Denmark’s Choir of Young Believers, it’s hard not to imagine an army of white-clad singers with arms outstretched, their voices raised in holy polyphony—in fact, the Danish group is the brainchild of one 26-year-old Jannis Noya Makrigiannis. For years, Jannis moved in the underground circles of the Copenhagen indie scene. After the breakup of his old band in 2006, he moved to the Greek island of Samos and began developing his own solo material. Jannis returned to Copenhagen and, gathering musicians and friends around him, formed Choir of Young Believers, an orchestral-pop project marked by magisterial melodies, dark lyrical concerns, and a healthy dose of cathedral-grade reverb.
The songs on Choir of Young Believers’ debut album This Is for the White In Your Eyes mix modest folk arrangements with ambitious, grandiose indie pop, cooled with a stoic Nordic distance and glowing
with an inner light. Choir Of Young Believers have been nominated for six Danish Grammies, winning “Best New Act”, and just recently performed stateside at SXSW and received rave reviews from
publications such as MOJO and Pitchfork. Musical nods to Roy Orbison, The Beach Boys, Pixies, and Hank Williams abound, but Jannis and his Choir Of Young Believers have forged their own neck-tinglingly singular sound. Live, the Choir takes many different shapes and sizes. Jannis often performs as a duo with a guitar or a piano and cello; other times, up to eight people fill the stage, playing everything from strings and horns to percussion and bells. The one constant is Jannis’ voice: clear, mournful, stretching to the heavens.
You can download “Action/Reaction” from This Is For The White In Your Eyes here
Choir Of Young Believers will releasing their second single, “Next Summer” from This Is For The White In Your Eyes is out now on Ghostly International.
“Next Summer,” the second single from Choir of Young Believers’ Ghostly debut This Is for the White in Your Eyes, is an exercise in larger-than-life musical gestures and classical drama. Employing high-altitude violins, booming orchestral percussion, and a steady procession of winsome melodies, Jannis Makrigiannis and his band shout the chorus’ bittersweet warning (“Next summer, I will return / I’ll be there / I’ll break your heart”) with terrifying conviction. As always, Jannis’ silvery tenor is the centerpiece, and when he whispers, “you’re so dramatic when you call,” it’s unclear whether he’s referencing the song’s central romantic conflict, or his own talent for eliciting exquisitely heightened emotions.
“Choir Of Young Believers sound just as earnest and grandiose as their name suggests” – Pitchfork
“With one foot firmly planted in the realm of orchestral pop, the other dipping its toe into ‘50s pop-song structures Makrigiannis crafts a Spartan but cinematic world of melody and melancholy” – Under The Radar
“a grand, flowing sound filtered through the narrow and dirty filter, which lends its own peculiar beauty, to create something both sprawling and contained.” – SUP