MUMBAI: Today, Kasbo releases his debut album Places We Don’t Know via Foreign Family Collective/Counter Records.
The LP features TENDER, Frida Sundemo, Keiynan Lonsdale, Amanda Fondell, and many more. Singles leading into release, including Aldrig Mer (feat. TENDER), Snow In Gothenburg, Over You (feat. Frida Sundemo), and Bleed It Out (feat. Nea) have garnered immense success at Spotify and Apple Music with over 12 million combined streams. Featured on Sirius XM Chill, KEXP, KCRW, and seen in Billboard, The FADER, The 405, Dancing Astronaut, Stereogum, Pilerats, Stoney Roads, and Highsnobiety, Kasbo earned multiple chart toppers this year on Hype Machine. Most recently, Kasbo also recently collaborated with producer Shallou on their recent record Find featuring Cody Lovaas.
Talking about Places We Don’t Know, Kasbo says, “Feels incredible to be releasing my debut album, it’s been such a long process and such a long challenge it kind of felt like this day would never come, but it did.”
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He further adds, “Conceptually the album is about romanticizing a naive worldview. That naiveness and ignorance is something to be cherished. There’s something really beautiful about the perfect worldview you have as a kid, that the world is harmless, beautiful and good. The more you learn and experience though, the more you realize everything isn’t perfect. So the less you know, the more beautiful it is, it’s the things we haven’t done, the places we don’t know, that have this unquestionable beauty to it. It’s this world I’m trying to mirror with my album, the one that stays in your imagination.”
Explaining the concept further, he says, “Musically I knew I wanted to do a sonic representation of the concept, blending worldly sounds with small bedroom type samples and soundscapes. I really loved the idea of those two polarizing things being the two main factors that would lay the ground for the album.”
When Carl Garsbo landed in Gothenburg at the tail end of 2015, the Swedish producer (better known asKasbo) couldn’t sit still. “I felt inspired beyond words,” says Garsbo, riding high from a recent trek with his labelmates ODESZA and the promising one-two punch of the wildly expressive Umbrella Club EP and tear duct-tapping World Away track, he didn’t waste any time. He got right back in the studio.
Garsbo fired up a few remixes first, including The Temper Trap (Fall Together), Big Gigantic (Little Things), and Mutemath (Monument). Once those palate cleansers set the scene for the next Kasbo record, a series of digital singles began to slip out, including the synth-laced balladry of Found You, the neon-lit high notes of Lay It On Me, and the steady build of Bleed It Out rounded out by the robust singer/songwriter skills of Linnea Södahl.
Out now through ODESZA’s own Foreign Family Collective and Counter Records, Places We Don’t Know is the debut LP Garsbo’s merely hinted at for the past four years. From its minimalist cover to its flurry of endorphin-flooding melodies, the record is a widescreen example of how buoyant house beats can make you move and cry.
“I feel like being an artist is not only making music,” he explains, “but expressing yourself in a ton of different forums. I want to get better at that; I want to branch out. I don’t want ‘Kasbo’ to just be a name who puts out music. I want it to be kind of a world to delve into.”
