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his six-piece band from Australia sound as though they come from Scandinavia and are as fresh as Swiss mountain air.
“Hands” is just one of many catchy yet reflective electro-pop tracks on the band’s debut album,A is for Alpine,which drops Stateside today. It is an impressive entrée, full of light-as-air vocals, shimmering production, and spare guitar notes. Now, the Melbourne-based performers are preparing for a thirteencity tour across North America in June. “Some days we’re driving for fourteen-and-a-half hours,” says Lou James,one of Alpine’s two lead vocalists, but “we’re planning on stopping at a lot of thrift shops.” By “we,” James means she and Phoebe Baker;the two have been early teens and, along with
fellow lead singer friends since their guitaristChristian
O’Brien,formed the band’s earlier iteration, Swiss, in 2007. The pairing of two front women may recall ABBA but as James emphasizes, “the whole duo female vocal was really just an accident.” It came to her surprise that their seemingly effortless harmony “was a really rare thing. When we first started, a lot of people were like, Wow, it’s insane how well your voices work together.” But it is disparate influences that add depth to the act’s highaltitude sound: Baker favors freestyle jazz à la Nina Simone, while the more measured James, reared on the Kinks and the Velvet Underground, prefers to write, then “develop, develop, develop” the leitmotifs of lust and longing that course through the record. After Alpine’s renaming, one fan told James that what she really heard was “I’ll pine.” “The idea of pining for something really suits our lyrics,” the singer says. “It just comes from exactly how we’re feeling.” Designed by Win-Kye Cheong
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