Wilma Vritra return with new single ‘One Under’ and announce their second album ‘Grotto‘ released via Bad Taste Records on the 6th May 2022. Watch the Taylor Jones directed music video above.
Grotto is the work of two musicians separated by an ocean but undoubtedly operating on a shared wavelength. One is Will Archer, a Newcastle-born but London-based multi-instrumentalist and composer who today records as Wilma Archer, but who you might also know for his writing and production for ar...
Wilma Vritra return with new single ‘One Under’ and announce their second album ‘Grotto‘ released via Bad Taste Records on the 6th May 2022. Watch the Taylor Jones directed music video above.
Grotto is the work of two musicians separated by an ocean but undoubtedly operating on a shared wavelength. One is Will Archer, a Newcastle-born but London-based multi-instrumentalist and composer who today records as Wilma Archer, but who you might also know for his writing and production for artists like Celeste, Nilufer Yanya and Jessie Ware. The other is Hal Donell Williams Jr, aka Vritra – a Los Angeles-based rapper whose tales of graft and grind are often couched in spiritual or cosmic terms. “That’s where my thoughts go at times,” he explains. “Hope, self-belief, self-worth, self-understanding – they are all forms of light, and when they glow bright your mood adjusts accordingly. That mood can attract or repel – same as the stars, same as the planets and their moons.”
Grotto twins Hal’s cosmic visions with equally expansive music. Tracks like ‘One Under’ and ‘Every Evening’ bloom with strings, brass and woodwind, but there’s a spaciousness to the orchestration that brings to mind a figure like Jean-Claude Vannier, the French composer whose music for Serge Gainsbourg brought dramatic strokes, the sense of emotional light and shade. “I wanted to give Hal as much room as he needed vocally, forgoing any kind of vocal hook – instead dedicating a larger portion of the song to instrumental storytelling,” explains Will.
In parallel to Grotto, Will was completing work on his debut solo album A Western Circular, a long-term project that saw the light of day on Domino imprint Weird World last March. Featuring guest spots from the late MF DOOM, Future Islands’ Samuel T Herring, Sudan Archives and Laura Groves, it also found Will expanding his compositional abilities – a sound it felt natural to carry over into Grotto. The album was brought to life with some of A Western Circular’s players – including twin cellists Clíona Ní Choileáin and Jonah Spindel, violinist Ellie Consta, and Dom Pusey juggling clarinet, bass clarinet and baritone sax. Also present on the record is Ben Reed, a UK bassist who played on Frank Ocean’s Endless and Blonde. Here he supplies a gorgeous fretless bass that lends Grotto its sense of groove and poise.
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