Heady with the thick musk of Escada pour homme, the sophisti-pop groove of Grasque is a post-everything album: post-bedtime, post-genre, post-structure and post-definitely-irony. Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, frontman and principle songwriter of this Copenhagen group, creates soundscapes as indebted to the smoky 1980s melodrama of Careless Whisper as they are illuminated in the laptop glow of chillwave. Admitting himself that his music is “more like trips, or feelings” than traditional songs, the group tune out of the orchestral-pop majesty of previous albums and replace such frivolities with the surreal art-pop favoured by Chairlift: all ambience and sensual serenity. There’s an oddly rootless sound to the record, too: tracks such as Serious Lover and Face Melting could be blasting out from a Tokyo karaoke bar or the chill-out room in a techno club in Ibiza; everything is amenable. Intangible and atmospheric, but not a lot to latch on to.
