London-based duo Real Lies have announced the release of their highly anticipated second album Lad Ash – due to arrive on April 22nd through their own imprint, UNREAL.
They’ve also shared a new single ‘An Oral History Of My First Kiss’ – a coming-of-age anthem about epiphany of first love and the awkward teenage quest to find it.
An evocative and wistful, snapshot of adolescent memory riven with gleaming beats, twinkling synths and atmospheric textures– which describes the timeless suburban feeling of being ‘13 on a village green’ and longing for ‘a place where things fucking happen’ – or as Kharas puts it, the “awkward gap between childhood and being properly teenage, a peripheral shadowland of not quite being enough”. Then, the song soars into a cellestial chorus courtesy of Zoee.
“Having garnered attention throughout 2021 by drip feeding music in the shape of ‘Oh Me, Oh My (Nicotine Patch)’, ‘Late Arcades’, ‘Since I’ and ‘Your Guiding Hand’, the release of Lad Ash now gives fans the chance to hear the full story.
In the years that have passed since the band’s debut album – 2015’s Real Life – they have undergone a significant makeover in both lineup and sound. Now operating as a duo, singer and lyricist Kevin Lee Kharas and producer Patrick King have perfected their unique formula of deeply autobiographical stories set to yearning production that both pays homage to and evolves the dance music they’ve obsessed over throughout their youth. Refining his renowned night-walker’s observationalism, Kharas is unbound in his lyricism on Lad Ash – peering deep into his past, we hear stories of addiction, grief and the still-unsolved disappearance of a best friend. Prioritising authenticity and the poetry innate to the highs and lows of hedonism, the pair have created an innovative and fresh body of work that evokes the spirit of youth and the melancholy of leaving it behind.”
Speaking about the track, Kharas says:
“Writing Lad Ash, which is in large part about the downsides of turning every Friday night into the Big Bang, I wanted to figure out why I behave in this way, and at what point my coordinates were set. I traced it back to the family wedding discos I’d go to as a shy, lanky 8-year-old, and the other world I glimpsed in the faces, voices and terrible dance moves of pissed-up second cousins and other strangers who were apparently related to me. I spent my teenage years trying to gain access to this secret world by any means necessary and finally succeeded one evening with a girl I’d met in town a couple of weeks before. I came of age in the space of a kiss. Then had my heart ripped out two days later, wet-look hair gel stinging my eyes as it washed out in the rain.
“Oral History is a song about girls with Saturday jobs and boys with nothing to do finding magic in each other, in boring places with boring people who have cruel and stupid ideas about anything or anyone who’s different. The video [directed by Bing] is meant to reflect that sense of being young and stuck somewhere, waiting for something to happen.”
The duo have announced an album release party at London’s Pickle Factory on April 28th. Fans can immediately get tickets by pre-ordering the album here, with general sale opening on Friday 11th.
Full Dates below …
01.04.22 YES Manchester
23.04.22 Motel Mozaique Rotterdam
28.04.22 The Pickle Factory London
30.04.22 Nice N Sleazy Glasgow
