Amsterdam’s Altin Gün release their new album Yol on ATO Records today. Yol, the follow-up to the sextet’s 2019 Grammy-nominated LP Gece, was written in quarantine, with the band members swapping demos over email. For the first time, the band also worked with an outside collaborator, bringing in the acclaimed electronic producer Asa Moto to mix the record. The result is a collection of sublime Europop tracks that Bandcamp hailed as “the group’s most vivacious record to date.”
Altin Gün has built a strong reputation for fusing past and present to make brilliantly catchy, upbeat pop music, continuing to incorporate the rich and incredibly diverse traditions of Anatolian and Turkish folk music. However familiar the story, Yol is not just a record that reframes traditional sounds for a contemporary audience. The album, which often presents a strongly international, poppy sound, also signals a very different approach in making and recording for the band. Singer Merve Dasdemir takes up the story: “We were basically stuck at home for three months making home demos, with everybody adding their parts. The transnational feeling maybe comes from that process of swapping demos over the internet, some of the music we did in the studio, but lockdown meant we had to follow a different approach.”
With Yol, Altın Gün has patented their own magical process of reimagining and sonic path-finding, one probably not heard since the late 1960s and early 1970s British folk-rock boom. Less of a reworking than a seduction, their recordings transport the listener to a world where the original songs never previously inhabited. Merve Dasdemir again: “After we worked on them, they got a whole new life of their own. Maybe we went a little bit too far.”
Listen to Yol here