Alternative Duo FOREIGN AIR Tap String Quartet For New EP ‘Blue Hour Sessions’; Out Today

Today, enigmatic electro-indie/alt-pop duo Foreign Air share their new EP, Blue Hour Sessions. It is a fresh and intimate take on five tracks from their 2022 LP, Hello Sunshine, swapping electronic production for a string quartet. They recorded the tracks in the solace of White Star Sound, a rural farm and recording studio in Virginia, where they also finished the 2022 LP. To go with the EP, they share the intimate performance video with the string quartet from the recording process. 

The band explains, “A song is never really finished. They evolve and change just like we do. Re-imagining songs we’ve already released was a lot of fun because the pressure is gone. It’s not about the small details anymore. The heavy lifting is done already, which are the chords and lyrics. Now, we get to decorate it completely differently. Sometimes, you need to move around the furniture in the room or paint the walls a new color. This keeps us sane. 

‘The Blue Hour’ sessions started as song renditions for intimate performances we put together during the pandemic. Some in a more traditional format…drums, bass, guitar, and piano as opposed to our often heavy electronic, synth bedroom production style. We then took it a step further by going back to the studio where we finished our latest album, ‘Hello Sunshine,’ and filmed a live performance with a string quartet, re-imagining the material again. We’ve always been inspired by film scores and movies, so we were excited to interpret some of our music with just a piano and strings.”

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Foreign Air, aka Jesse Clasen and Jacob Michael, dropped their debut album, Good Morning Stranger, in October of 2020. Before that, they released 10 singles, as well as the For The Light EP, starting with the glitchy, spectral “Free Animal,” which became an immediate hit. Nike snapped up the latter for an ad – and everyone from Samsung, Vodafone, Microsoft, to Showtime, ABC, and Vice soon followed. Their 2022 album, Hello Sunshine, is a dark, grooving indie-electronic album comprised of 14-tracks that flow between brighter alt-pop and foreboding indie-electronic tracks. It is a deeply personal album with all the tracks written, recorded, produced, and engineered by the duo except for “Blue Days” which was co-written with K.Flay. All told, Foreign Air’s music has been streamed more than 150 million times on Spotify and Apple, they have been featured on sites like Billboard, Grammy.com, and COLLIDE, and they have toured with notable acts like Misterwives, Bishop Briggs, Bleachers, Anna Shoemaker and more.