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.
We Speak Music
Christian Balvig releases gorgeous new album ‘Find And You Will Seek’ in collaboration with Ensemble Hermes.
Acclaimed composer and arranger Christian Balvig is known for his work with an array of artists and bands like Jade, Efterklang, Lowly, When Saints Go Machine and Mew, as well as his work with some of the most acclaimed orchestras like Royal Northern Sinfonia (BBC Proms), The Royal Danish Orchestra, Copenhagen Phil, London Contemporary Orchestra, The Danish Radio Broadcast Orchestra and The Norwegian Wind Ensemble.
The cinematic sound on his new album might echo Balvig’s work in the world of film and TV music. Scoring the 2025 Oscar shortlisted short movie ‘Eternal Father’ and the Danish hit series ‘Cry Wolf’ (Ulven Kommer), which has been shown on television in more than 30 countries around the globe, including Channel 4 in the UK. He was also nominated for a Harpa award for ‘Best score’ last year at the Berlinale for ‘The Son and the Moon (Min Arv Bor I Dig)’.
Balvig’s new album, ‘Find And You Will Seek’, backed by Danish string group Ensemble Hermes, grew organically out of this background of experiences and is music that appeals to listeners seeking original, immersive music with space for reflection and contemplation.
‘Find And You Will Seek’ is a collection of chamber works that explore the combination of piano and strings in new ways. Recent single ‘The BirdSuite II – Praesentia’ is part of a 3-part Suite running throughout the record, written and performed on a custom made “Keybird” piano, which is an una-corda (one string pr note) piano that gives a more subtle and intimate sound. On top of it is a lush and emotional string ensemble arrangement with Ensemble Hermes in multiple layers fluctuating in and out of the keybird piano.
Balvig’s second single from the record is ‘What Happened To The World’, an ultra transparent neo-classical inspired piece, with slow melodic structures, a simple chord progression and emotional performance starting with a floating viola solo. It is written from the feeling that the world sometimes goes backwards, and you feel left on the platform wanting to take the train in a different direction.
From film music inspired pieces to experimental chamber music over piano concerto inspired movements, to more neo-classical productions with almost orchestral sounding dubs of strings, ‘Find And You Will Seek’ flows with emotions and lush sound worlds, always with a tangible organic texture.
Find Christian Balvig and Ensemble Hermes on tour in Denmark:
27.5 Ansgars Kirke (Odense)
28.5 Folkegaarden Festival (Aalborg)
29.5 Gnisten (Ry)
30.5 Musikhuset (Aarhus)
1.6 Basement (Copenhagen)
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