We Speak Music
Lone Assembly release expansive and grandiose new album ‘Knots & Chains’
Swiss quartet Lone Assembly present their debut album, “Knots & Chains”: hymns of pain, alienation, and sorrow, certainly, but also of hope, strength, and courage. Cloaked in a gothic aesthetic, the record is a new wave/synth-pop exploration of control in all its forms: control exerted by others, cultivated within ourselves, and imposed by the places we inhabit.
When Lone Assembly released “That Never Happened” in early 2024, a debut EP paying tribute to a lost loved one, the band quickly became more than just a group of friends making music: it became a space for healing, a place of closeness, a necessity. And while this urgency was evident in the band’s first songs, it is even more apparent on their debut album.
“Knots & Chains” leans heavily into chiaroscuro, casting shifting light across songs born of profound darkness. Here, the band uses each track as a means to examine control in its various forms. First, there is the control that others exert, as in the unsuccessful attempts of the narrator of “You’re Pulling at the Same Strings” to understand the evil that dwells within the other: “I’ve been wondering where your ache breathes, in mazes you design?” Then there is the control we exert over ourselves, as in the captivating “The Pain Keeper” and “My Life’s Solid.” And finally, there is the control of places that also transcend us, as in “The City Works Like This,” where the city acts like a living organism, absorbing, rejecting, distorting.
While the topics addressed by the band are dark, glimmers of hope emerge here and there, in the form of a vital need for air, as is the case with the banger “In the Open.” “The album takes shape like a cycle, moving from suffocation to openness, from closed spaces to greater, albeit fragile, breathing space,” explains Raphaël Bressler (vocals).
Musically, the record is characterized by an eighties coldness polished with a magnificently modern production: you can hear both their admiration for the golden years of Factory Records and the pop straight forwardness of bands like Editors. Everything here is expansive and grandiose: the sound, the ambition, the power of the lyrics, the soaring guitars, every beat of the rhythm section. Raphaël Bressler’s voice leads the way throughout the tracks, captivating with its depth and gravity. The quartet, also composed of Glenn Le Meur (guitar), Jim Bodeman (bass), and Romain Segu (drums), delivers a debut album that cultivates both high aesthetic standards and remarkable pop appeal.
To support the album release, Lone Assembly are heading out on a UK tour this spring:
LONE ASSEMBLY, UK, Spring 2026
May 19th– Bristol, The Jam Jar
May 20th– Manchester, FAC251
May 21st– Leeds, Belgrave Music Hall
May 22nd– Brighton, Patterns
May 23- Glasgow, Oran Mor
May 24th– The Moth Club, London
Get tickets here: https://fanlink.tv/badapplemusic_la_rn
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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