Luka Powell channels the savage heart of Blondie and the sharp edges of Wolf Alice into a dreamy, indie rock banger with Hindsight. The track was written at the tentative age of 16 while she busked in malls and made appearances at festivals.
Having already had some success including over 180,000 streams on Soundcloud, she’s not totally new to the game. Hindsight however is her first official studio release and we are hugely excited to be a part of it. The track is raw and heartfelt, vicious and jangly, and thunders with electrostatic nostalgia: A bit of 90’s indie, a sprinkle of Grimes, and a whole lot of raucous goodness.
Credits
Sharing the credits on the track are Sam Johnston and Cyrano:
Sam Johnston
Sam is the lead man in Leif Erikson, a well-established transatlantic pop-maestro with a fantastic catalogue of well-crafted records under his belt. We were very excited to hear him producing Hindsight and have heard another demo come down the wire that expands on that initial collaboration.
Cyrano
Sharing the writing credits on Hindsight with Luka and Sam is Scottish producer Cyrano. This multi-instrumentalist electronica-pop warlock makes music for “the late-night overthinkers”, blending disparate genres like techno and R&B in a heady cocktail of driving beats and cinematic synthscapes.
Production notes
Hindsight was an excellent, jagged, demo when we first heard it. It wasn’t exactly mix-ready but we decided to give it a go and have it mixed and mastered anyway. The mix took some time and Producer Sam Johnston was instrumental in developing the demo into a releasable master with new vocals, percussion, and Bass.
The tasty thing about the demo was a heavy-handed approach to the way things had been compressed. It was a big part of the sound they had developed for hindsight and with some careful unpicking and a very complicated multi-bus approach to the mix (think Micheal Brauer here) we were able to get a similar aggressive hyper compression without losing the raw expressiveness of the instruments.
We went to town on a multi-layered delay-reverb effect for Luka’s Vocals that was ridden by hand throughout the track to get that expressive vicious-dreamy duality that the song delivers so well.
