Premiere: Visions Of Trees – Visions Of Trees (album stream)

Sara Atalar and Joni Juden are a pair of softly spoken musicians from London who love radical pop music and R&B, and are releasing their debut album next week through Something In Construction.

It’s worth mentioning Visions Of Trees’ adoration of pop, because this is a work of love, a sincere love letter to radical, emotional, gentle music. As such, it’s an album of moments of really quite incredible beauty, and very clever balancing of melody and harmony, but created with an almost punkly bashful element of direct and unabashed creativity. Their earlier singles were shimmering in tone and sprawling in structure, but their album is stronger, cleaner, a clearer voice, and icier in stare, though still singing softly, and we are proud to present it to you below, exclusively a week ahead of release.

“Lot of our stuff is about longing to be something or somewhere else, like chilling in a forest with snakes and us wanting to project that to the audience. Yeah, not sure how long we’d last in the wilderness although I live a pretty simple life in a sense that I haven’t got a TV or like video games or anything like that,” Joni said in an interview with The Fader, and the offhand quip belies what makes Visions such a great band – this is fantasy music, made in sort of cheerful, simple isolation. Hermits dreaming of the outside world, with The-Dream open on one tab and David Attenborough in the other, with a head full of radical ideas.