Loney dear releases first live album ‘Atlantis’

Recorded at one of Stockholm’s last great studios from a golden-era of record making, Atlantis Studios inspired not only the name of the album, but provides the backdrop for what is unquestionably a live album, but one with a difference. The performance was recorded in April 2021 with global events disrupting both audience and band members alike, “We were only allowed to have eight people in the audience,” remembers Emil Svanängen, “which happened that morning. The day before we could have had 50. It was a big crisis and I was super stressed about it, but it was a classic ‘show must go on’ situation.”

Despite the practical obstacles, what Atlantis captures is a rather remarkable testimony to the power of Svanängen’s song-writing and the skill of the band members who – with hardly a rehearsal – add depth and dimension to the compositions. The song choices are largely culled from Loney dear’s last two studio records, A Lantern and a Bell and Loney dear, but older songs such as Largo and Maria Is That You? (from Hall Music) and Violent (from Dear John) also feature, given renewed energy by the ensemble of Per Texas Johansson (clarinet), Mattias Ståhl (vibraphone), Johan Lindström (pedal steel), Johan Graden (piano), Josef Kallerdahl (bass) and Konrad Agnas (drums).

Atlantis is available on all Digital Platforms

A limited number of LPs are available from the Loney dear shop 

For co-producer Emanuel Lundgren, there’s something else revealed by these recordings, too, that plays to the contradictions at the heart of Loney dear. “There’s a big difference from being at home, recording albums in an almost bedroom-studio environment, to playing live which has always been a very social and a very improvised environment. Very wild in comparison. It’s interesting to hear that side of Emil, that has not been documented before.”

Although initially conceived as a means to celebrate the release of Loney dear’s eighth album ‘A Lantern and a Bell’, the performance captured by Atlantis does much more. It’s become of story of triumph over adversity, musical abandon over constraint and joy over uncertainty. Nothing was going to stop it, “Atlantis is the fictional island mentioned in an allegory in the hubris of nations, this according to Plato the philosopher. It sank into the ocean. We’d planned for months to do a session and we had no intentions of sinking those plans.”