A Lantern and a Bell Loney Dear

• 1Mute / All things pass03:29
• 2Habibi (A clear black line)02:26
• 3Trifles03:53
• 4Go Easy on Me Now (Sirens + emergencies)04:33
• 5Last night / Centurial Procedures (the 1900s)01:38
• 6Oppenheimer03:30
• 7Darling01:32
• 8Interval / Repeat03:16
• 9A House and a Fire03:24
• Total Runtime27:41

Info for A Lantern and a Bell

Sea birds, distorted noise, and then the line “Mighty ships hung over ground” — the marine theme not only begins but makes its mark throughout the entirety of A Lantern and a Bell, the first album from Loney dear since 2017, released on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records label.

The soundscape, with Emil Svanängen’s unmistakable falsetto at the very front of the mix, is extremely stripped down. Strictly musically, one could describe the music as sublime sacred minimalism, but just as much, it’s a story about the trust and friendship that has developed between Emil and producer Emanuel Lundgren in their mythical studio on western Södermalm in Stockholm.

“The goal was for Emil not to hide, but to dare to come forward,” says Emanuel. “We have slowly become friends for nine years, but only now could we work so closely together, and the proximity is heard.”

“It has taken me a while to dare to surrender,” says Emil. “My previous albums have been ‘collage records’, made in the belief that perfectionism exists, in a mania. Here I wanted to go in exactly the opposite direction and simplify. That’s why we recorded everything ourselves without any other musicians.”

The album clocks in at 27 minutes and 45 seconds — like a tautly plotted half-hour tv drama — and was recorded in just six months. To Emil’s voice, usually only a compliant piano, a discreet double bass, occasional chords, and diffused water sounds, at dark low frequencies, pulsating from below unknown depths, recorded under high pressure. The compositions themselves are seemingly simple, very easily accessible harmonically, but all the more provocatively existentially, not least the album’s perhaps strongest moment, the veritable test of strength ‘Go Easy On Me Now’.

“When the work on this album started, I was feeling quite low, I had changed, half my life had changed. I ended up in a really bad place, a state of despair,” says Emil. “And then we record this, and it’s easily the best thing we’ve done, with songs filled with laughter and darkness about each other. In a way, the whole album is probably a story about losing your temper.”

For those who know their Loney dear, the constant references to sea and ships are hardly something new. “All that is an important part of my inner life, maybe a romantic dream of adventure, but also a phobia, a danger I cannot help but be drawn to. Near where I live, freighters pass by every day and the sounds of their engines get into my head. And further into the music.”

"The simple romanticism of A Lantern And A Bell’s minor-key piano chords showcase Svanangen’s enviable melodic gifts." (UNCUT)

"Simple arrangements — just his warm falsetto and piano, with water sounds and seabirds passing overhead — foster a reflective, bonfire-on-the-beach spirit." (MOJO)

Emil Svanängen
Emanuel Lundgren
Additional musicians:
Mattias Ståhl, marimba, vibraphone on ‘Mute’ and ‘Oppenheimer’
Konrad Agnas, percussion on ‘Oppenheimer’

Produced by Emanuel Lundgren and Emil Svanängen

Emil Svanängen (aka Loney dear)
Swedish singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emil Svanängen makes records and plays shows under the enigmatic name of Loney dear. In the early 2000s, in his Stockholm apartment studio, Svanängen made a name for himself by creating homemade CDrs with a minidisk microphone and a home computer, self-releasing albums which by 2007 had pricked Sub Pop's ears and they released Loney Noir. Two more albums - Dear John and Hall Music - followed, as did glowing reviews in The Guardian, BBC, Drowned in Sound, Pitchfork and earlier this year the Line of Best Fit went as far as calling him a "brilliant genius”.

Loney dear has consistently crafted elegant, deeply stirring music, described by The Quietus as "…the obsessive work of one man, albeit one that can sing with the vulnerable delicacy of an angel and makes bedroom recordings that sound like God's own orchestra”.

Multi-layered with instrumentation and Svanängen's fragile yet irrepressible vocals, Loney dear's songs bloom with a sense of both intimacy and openness, at once uplifting and heartbreaking, tenacious yet tender.

In 2017 Svanängen finds himself at something of a crossroads. His career, in many ways, has been as unique as his music. "I've been taking some strange roads. Basically, I have a really strange career and I have no idea where it's going. Everything is always random because my career is so small and slow. I have had to learn to enjoy all the randomness of what I'm doing.”

After all these years in the music industry, Svanängen has reached a stage in which he is not striving to be loved, to be big, to be recognised or feels that he is deserving of more than he has. Above all, he feels emboldened and powerful simply by the new music he is making, as featured on his latest album. "I'm moving into a more bold state, I'm confident, powerful, I became a singer, I learned my darkness and discovered my magnetism”.

Since his 2017 album, live concerts in unique spaces have become a primary forum for creative exploration, and his next recordings will mirror this. Emil says, “It’s such an interesting evolution... these possibilities for subtracting rather than adding. Intricate music written for just one instrument and a voice is, for me now, a way of merging worlds.”

This album contains no booklet.