The Album Leaf Shares New Single 'Afterglow' Featuring Kimbra

Visionary electronic artist The Album Leaf shares his transcendent new single, "Afterglow," featuring New Zealand singer Kimbra.

The driving beats build over her flawless vocals. Kimbra explains, "I remember first hearing this instrumental and really connecting with the somber yet hopeful mood. It really reminded me of the end of a relationship and the different ways we attempt to make sense of the outcome. I found a poem I'd written when I was going through exactly that and put melody to it. It fit like a puzzle piece. I love the ways that Jimmy built the arrangement to decorate these words, and I'm so proud of how it turned out."

Jimmy adds, "I had always imagined vocals when I wrote this song. I didn't have a specific emotion or any kind of story I wanted to tell and KIMBRA came in and told her story. She created a narrative that fit the tone and feel of the music. It was truly a seamless collaboration. Her vocal delivery is a special gift. Her vocal inspired an arrangement that pushed the song in a new direction, with added instrumentation from my longtime collaborator, Keith Milgaten and trumpet from Ryan Svendsen, I'm extremely grateful to share this song with her."

This week, The Album Leaf also announced a tour to support his upcoming record, FUTURE FALLING, out May 5th. The tour launches in his native San Diego on May 13th and includes stops in Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and New York, before wrapping in his current hometown of Los Angeles on June 9th. A full list of dates is below.

FUTURE FALLING will be his first original body of work, not including his numerous notable film scores and re-issues, since his acclaimed 2016 album Between Waves, and features artists like Kimbra and Bat For Lashes. For the past seven years, the prolific Jimmy LaValle put his primary focus on the tight deadlines that came with scoring films and collaborations with apps like Calm, allowing the loose concept of the "next record" to stretch on with over two hundred demos written and dozens of album ideas before the ten final tracks that comprise, FUTURE FALLING, finally stood out to him. A fluid, cohesive, and definitive set, the record exhibits LaValle as emblematically inquisitive and renewed by outside perspectives.

A desire for innovation, and the necessity of the pandemic, forced many of the collaborations to be done remotely, making LaValle the arranger of layers from all over: drums, synths, horns, violins, voice, and more. Without the in-the-room dynamics, he had more time to experiment, adding and subtracting ad infinitum with LaValle's signature Rhodes taking a back seat to the synths, effects pedals, and other analog-sourced electronics. With various machines, including the Novation Peak and Moog DFAM, as his engine, LaValle routes the sounds in and out, re-sampling and manipulating drums and tones to achieve the shapes his mind's eye was seeing.

"There's a lot more exploration, out of the box; I've found a really good balance in creating music organically and analog, utilizing digital tools to tweak the source further." The result, mixed by Joshua Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv), is a masterful exercise in pacing; the music meanders, pulses, and arcs in a way that arrests attention.

The Album Leaf has been steadily making his mark as a soft-spoken innovator since 1999. Now based in LA, Jimmy LaValle started out in the San Diego music scene creating vivid, rhythmic, soaring instrumentals centered around the Rhodes piano. With over two decades of acclaimed releases (for Sub Pop, City Slang, and others), countless film scores, and numerous collaborations with artists and brands, he has become a touchstone for the next generation's wave of melodic and meditative electro-organic music.

Pre-Save FUTURE FALLING here. Listen to the new single here:

THE ALBUM LEAF HEADLINE TOUR:

5/13 San Diego, US-CA | Casbah

5/16 Seattle, US-WA | Madame Lou's

5/17 Portland, US-OR | Mission Theatre

5/19 San Jose, US-CA | The Ritz

5/20 San Francisco, US-CA | The Independent

6/1 Chicago, US-IL | Lincoln Hall

6/2 Boston, US-MA | Arts at the Armory

6/3 New York, US-NY | Brooklyn Made

6/9 Los Angeles, US-CA | Lodge Room

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