8x8 Announces New Album With First Single 'Spring Airlines'

Kyiv/NYC-based duo 8x8 have announced an upcoming full-length album. The first single, 'Spring Airlines,' is out now.

The trans-Black Sea duo 8X8 possess an intuitive musical lexicon conversant in all things groovy 1960s. Yet neither member speaks the other's native language—and they've never spoken or met in person. Singer-songwriter Lane Steinberg lives in New York City, while multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Alex Khodchenko resides in Kyiv, Ukraine. Over the past 16 years, the pair have maintained a remarkably prolific partnership, releasing six albums. Their latest, Immaculate Constellation, is the first installment of a planned double album.

'We're unburdened by the things of terrestrial relationships. It feels like we're just floating in the cosmos, and the 'Immaculate Constellation' is our work environment,' Steinberg says with a laugh. 'I just made that up! It's almost a running joke that we don't really know anything about each other, but we don't want to break the spell.'

The two have discussed the Russo-Ukrainian War, and its shadow has inevitably seeped into 8X8's music (their previous album was titled Life During Wartime). Immaculate Constellation, named after a rumored UFO program, explores fatalism and deeper psychological terrain while retaining the band's world-weary playfulness. The 14-song collection is starker and less ornate than its predecessors, balancing hard-edged, Nuggets-styled rockers with bittersweet atmospheric ballads and whimsical psychedelia. Steinberg promises the second volume will be stranger and more experimental.

Steinberg is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and longtime fixture of New York City's rock scene, having performed with the Beatle-pop band The Wind as well as on solo projects and collaborations with R. Stevie Moore. His contributions to 8X8 are reactive, providing lyrics, vocal melodies, and lead guitar to Khodchenko's pop psychedelic soundscapes. Khodchenko is a visual artist and mad scientist multi-instrumentalist (piano, bass, drums, and some guitars) and songwriter/composer. 'He has a unique authenticity, like he was frozen in 1967, and defrosted in the present day,' Steinberg says.

The pair met via Myspace back in 2010 when Khodchenko proposed collaborating with Steinberg. Their partnership was a success right out of the gate with their first song, 'Snowflake In The Rain,' garnering accolades and attention. The two quickly developed a workflow with the help of Google translate and the internet. Steinberg honed in on an automatic writing style where he would download Khodchenko's email with the attached song, put it in Pro Tools, get the levels right, and set up his microphone and just start singing. The guys decided to call themselves 8X8 as the visual graphic looks like two identical beings on either side of the X.

For years, their relationship remained almost entirely musical and artistic, but the war cast a dark cloud over the partnership. Steinberg encouraged Khodchenko to treat their music as a refuge from daily life, and together they worked more intensely than ever, writing enough material for two albums. Originally conceived as a single double album, Immaculate Constellation ultimately became two separate releases.

The single, Spring Airlines, is a piano driven rocker about a fictitious, psychedelic airline that can transport one to an idyllic time and place that may exist only in one's soul. The songs lyrics read like lysergic ad copy. The opening line is: It's your love letter to the world/You stitched it seam by seam/It's your love letter to the world/A dream inside a dream/The peacock's purple train/Cloudburst, a gentle rain. Musically, 'Spring Airlines' exudes a breezy Todd Rundgren sophistication, with sweetly dissonant piano chords rubbing against bluesy guitar leads. It's a near-perfect blend of 1970s pop craftsmanship and classic rock.

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