Shoegaze is a genre that never goes out of style. Oyama are an Icelandic quintet who started making dreamy guitar music long after the genre’s initial wave had broken, but they found an audience for their early releases: an EP called I Wanna, and their first album Coolboy, released ten years ago this year.
Things have been relatively quiet since then, but now Oyama are back in action with new single Cigarettes, a characteristically languid, melodic, and melancholic track.
“We’ve been busy in the studio with Árni Hjörvar Árnason for the past year, both in Sundlaugin and his studio, working on our upcoming album,” they say. “Our last release, the Opaque Days EP, came out in early 2020, but our plans for the rest of that year fell through. It took us a couple of years to pick the pieces back up, but after some (amicable) member rotations, we got back into gear in 2022. The new album is a result of new songs we’ve written since then, as well as some older ideas we decided to revisit and develop further. This year is the 10-year anniversary of our first (and only other) full-length album, Coolboy, so it feels good and exciting to drop a second big release at this point. We’ve been testing the new songs out live when we’ve had a chance, and we’ve gotten some great feedback which made us even more eager to get them recorded and released.”
The new album is slated for an October release, and we can expect some live performances around that time too. Until then, enjoy Cigarettes*.
(*the song, that is. The Grapevine doesn’t formally endorse smoking, ya filthy animal.)
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