We Speak Music
Blue Foundation announce tour and release ‘Harsh Love’ featuring Helena Gao!
Blue Foundation return with ‘Harsh Love’, a haunting, intimate new track added to their latest album ‘Close to the Knife’. Featuring the ethereal vocals of Helena Gao, the song captures the ache of emotional dissonance, the quiet collapse between two people trying to love through damage.
Written during the same sessions that birthed ‘Close to the Knife’, ‘Harsh Love’ carries the same emotional weight: minimal yet lush, driven by ambient textures, fractured rhythms, and lyrical honesty. Helena Gao’s voice weaves through the track like a distant memory, fragile, questioning, unresolved.
“I guess I took it out on you,” the song begins, disarmed and direct. It’s a confession, not an apology. The kind of truth you whisper in the dark when everything else has already come undone.
In the words of Blue Foundation’s Tobias Wilner:
“It’s about the moment where you realize love has turned into something else, something harder, colder. But still, you’re reaching. You’re trying to hold on. Helena understood that from the inside.”
Helena Gao also appears on ‘Ecstasy in Space’ and ‘Voyage to the Stars’, but ‘Harsh Love’ stands apart in its stark emotional clarity. Sparse production, slow-burn synths, and whispered harmonies unfold like smoke. It’s not a song about closure. It’s a song about what happens when there isn’t any.
The track features atmospheric guitar textures by Xie Yugang of Wang Wen and Jonas Munk (Manual, Causa Sui), whose layered work expands the sonic space, stretching tension into something strangely beautiful. Together, their guitars give ‘Harsh Love’ its cinematic weight, floating just above the wreckage.
More songs will be added to ‘Close to the Knife’ in the coming months, each one an extension of the same world: fractured, beautiful, and brutally honest.
The band have also announced a new tour for later this year, including a London date at Oslo, Hackney on October 17th.
Former ‘The Voice’ finalist and renowned TV sync music writer LLOREN releases her next single ‘Like I Need’.
On the track, LLOREN explains, “After coming out of a 12-year relationship, I realised that any love I accepted next would have to be something spectacular, the kind of romance you see on movie screens. It wasn’t that I wasn’t loved before, just not in the way I needed. When I started developing a new crush, as exciting as it was, I knew I couldn’t settle. I wanted and deserved the kind of love that sweeps you off your feet, full of passion, magic, and possibility. Nothing less. The chorus is a pretty much a road map to my heart!”.
Produced by Daniel Pashman, ‘Like I Need’ captures feelings of hope and anticipation, while keeping the retro, anthemic vibe that’s quickly becoming LLOREN’s signature. The track’s melancholic under-tones are swept away in a thick 80s production, as the chorus hits hard with its instantly engaging and relatable themes, bringing all of the feels of searching for new love.
Hit TV show The Traitors, Grey’s Anatomy, The L Word, 1923, Wish, The Company You Keep, Made In Chelsea, Love Island UK and Love Island USA are just some of the many sync credits LLOREN has amassed to date, which have steadily proved her rich, multi-faceted vocal and powerful contemporary inspired compositions to be a cut above the rest.
Tracks from LLOREN’s hugely anticipated forthcoming debut album ‘It’s Always Sunny in LA’ have already picked up airplay from BBC Radio 2’s Angela Griffin and Radio X’s John Kennedy and press acclaim from prestigious music tastemakers Louder Than War and The Line Of Best Fit, as momentum continues to build. LLOREN’s video for her track ‘Like This’ also won a Telly Award in the US, as well as also being nominated for a prestigious Leo Award in Canada.
LLOREN appeared at The Gibson Garage All Day Festival in London earlier this year and in her career to date has opened European tours for Fleurie, Johannes Oerding and Michael Patrick Kelly respectively, played the UK’s annual PRIDE celebrations in Manchester and London and toured with Mauvey, with whom she collaborated with on the track ‘Pillow’, performing it at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend as well as the Isle Of Wight Festival 2023.
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