STEPH YATES’ (COTS) SANDRO PERRI-PRODUCED ALBUM IS OUT AUGUST 11, 2021 VIA BOILED RECORDS
LISTEN TO “MIDNIGHT AT THE STATION” & PREORDER HERE
“There’s bleakness to spare on the dystopian ‘Midnight at the Station’” MOJO
“Cots leans into gentleness” - Exclaim!
Photo Credit: JG+Shi // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Disturbing Body, the intimate debut album by Cots, paints a celestial portrait of lost love and consequence. The solo project of Montreal/Guelph composer, singer, and guitarist Steph Yates blends elements of bossa nova, folk, jazz, and classical against a modern art backdrop, her subtly unconventional style brushed across its lush palette. “Flowers” introduced the album’s masterful blend of the delicate and the macabre: a gorgeous meditation on death that highlights Yates’s captivating voice and provoking lyricism. “Our Breath” showcased the album’s experimental tendencies and sundown habitat, softly flooded with warbled vocal effects and hand drums radiating ambience.
Today, Cots shares the final preview single ahead of Disturbing Body’s release. Entitled “Midnight at the Station,” the album’s closing passage takes place “while waiting for a train that is very late and might possibly not come at all,” Yates muses. Fittingly mysterious and lonesome, melodious yet vividly disquieting, “Midnight at the Station” enmeshes nocturnal jazz and askew indie-bossa: Yates’s punctuative vocals grip the song, while forlorn synths by renowned producer Sandro Perri mingle with her nylon guitar trot and expressive saxophone by Karen Ng. Head on a carpet bag, chin on an open book, Cots leads Disturbing Body towards its terminal abyss. She says:
“The end section is something of an outro to the entire record and I wanted it to feel different from the rest of the song. Sandro built a spot-on, dystopian sonic dreamscape for it and I love it. For me it is a perfectly ambiguous moment to end on.”
LISTEN AND SHARE "MIDNIGHT AT THE STATION" HERE
After residual effects of a concussion left Cots uncertain how to finish the record on her own, she reached out to Toronto musician and producer Perri about working together – his production notes of “play louder” and “sing plainer” eventually making indelible marks on the contours of each song. Disturbing Body found its rhythm over four cosy days in Guelph at The Cottage studio, run by Canadian veteran recording artist and engineer Scott Merritt. The result saw her crystalline vocals and intricate guitar entwined with Perri’s atmospheric arrangements for Blake Howard (percussion), Josh Cole (bass guitar), Ryan Brouwer (trumpet), Karen Ng (saxophone), Thomas Hammerton (keyboards), and Perri himself (synths, samples, field recordings).
With the elements in place, the deft sonic precision of Disturbing Body evokes Yates’s understated yet detailed songcraft and attention to lyrical play. Over ponderous instrumental incursions, Yates’s crystalline voice carries the gravitas of the album’s ten elegiac movements.
“These songs, for the most part, have to do with the heart, something I was shy to write about previously,” Yates reveals. “It's possible my deepening love for Brazilian music, wherein some of my favourite artists sing freely about o coração, emboldened me in this way. As a collection, the songs give a prismatic view of a lone heart in its course having known closeness and having known loss.”
Disturbing Body will be released August 11, 2021 via Boiled Records on vinyl and digital formats.
PRE-ORDER DISTURBING BODY HERE
Sparked by her fascination with mathematics' vast poetic potential, and the power of celestial mechanics, Disturbing Body explores the unexplainable interactions of interstellar bodies and human beings alike. The title – inspired by the phrase for a planet whose gravitational pull alters another planet's course – speaks similarly to the disruptive nature of love.
“I find it strange, unsettling, mysterious; how incalculable the experience of feeling drawn to someone is,” Yates says. “Human bodies are like celestial ones; just as a planet’s course is carved out in relation to others, our course - where we go and what we do - is compelled by forces of attraction.”
WATCH "FLOWERS" HERE
Across Disturbing Body’s disparate touchpoints and searching melodies – somewhere between the stars and earthly interactions alike – Cots intersects, and starts to make a whole lot of sense. “A cot is a solitary, introspective, and dreamy space. It’s temporary too, suggesting liminality, moving on, passing through. It’s something you leave behind.”
ALBUM ARTWORK // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
DISTURBING BODY TRACKLIST
1. Disturbing Body
2. Bitter Part of the Fruit
3. Sun-Spotted Apple
4. Bluebird
5. Inertia of a Dream
6. Flowers
7. Salt or Sand
8. Our Breath
9. Last Sip
10. Midnight at the Station