Oh Wonder – 22 Break

Price: P2300
LABEL: Republic
UPC:0602438244768
RELEASE:11/19/2021

The fourth full length album from the excellent indie-synth-poppers Oh Wonder, following on from 2020’s No One Else Can Wear Your Crown.

‘22 Break’ is a portal into such emotional states, and the life-changing, universal breakup themes (loneliness, inadequacy, resentment, fears for the future) as experienced in real-time by one couple in their garden shed. The production is icy, sparse and filled with bloops and bleeps, like a message from the ether is trying to come through – which, in a way, it was. Amidst the darkness, there finally came a glimmer of hope. With the record written, the couple went away in September 2020 and finally talked. “It was such a weird thing, to make a break-up album with the person you’re breaking up with, while you’re breaking up,” Anthony reflects (the first in history, Josephine thinks). Even weirder, the album that almost ended them proved to be the band’s salvation: ‘22 Break’ is an ultimately cathartic, deeply hopeful project, the light at the end of the tunnel that was Oh Wonder’s quite particular pandemic.