One of contemporary pop’s leading visionaries and a production extraordinaire returns with a teaser single ahead of a new album, and it is as striking as expected.
Synedoche Montauk is the moniker of the Moscow-born, London-based Savva Rozanov. Savva is a singer/songwriter/producer who has been redefining genres for a decade since his solo project Synedoche Montauk launched, and he does so with a mixture of Russian, cold darkness, reflective, provocative lyrics, and finely crafted musical soundscapes that are equally poignant, beautiful, and desolate, and none of this could be at a better display than on KG, the lead single off his upcoming full-length album ‘ACUME’.
‘KG’ is an electropop song with a glacial, end-of-the-world sound to it, courtesy of looming, warped synths, a melancholy-laced composition, a memorable and hectic electronic drum part, and Savva’s sensible and soulful delivery, and for those of us who don’t speak Russian, the mystique of its sound strikes a particular chord that makes the sound of the piece even more desolate and dark.
Recorded at the height of the pandemic, the album’s songs were mostly written in a short time and directly from the heart and were sent to the mastering stage in the month before the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred, which prompted Savva to rethink the release of those songs. Having no words in the album about war or conflict might seem a little disconnected from reality, but Rozanov deemed the album’s contemplative observations about our past to be of help in explaining the current world we live in.
‘KG’ is full of doom and gloom, but with easy-to-see elegance and grace to its pacing, sound design, and vocal performance, for a result that’s stunning yet brimming with darkness, which is to be expected from one of the world’s leading, Russian-speaking pop artists that you may have never heard of. Yet.