Sondre Lerche will release new double album Avatars Of Love on April 1, and as a Valentine's Day gift to us, he's shared the gorgeous, swoony title track and its whimsical, wistful animated lyric video. Against a jazzy, synthy orchestral backing -- all very Prefab Sprout -- Sondre lets loose a litany of romantic imagery, including some of his favorite movies and records. "Play ‘Signs’ by Drake or ‘Signs’ by Snoop," he sings before rhyming it with "Play every single damn Disintegration Loop."
“I had scribbled the title ‘Avatars of Love’ in my notebook when I started writing the songs for this album, but the title track itself didn't materialize until the end of the whole process," Sondre says. "On an excursion up north to the Lofoten Islands in Norway to start work on a new book I instead ended up spending the whole week writing ‘Avatars’. I thought I was done with the album, but this song kept coming. It was meant to be a small, compact song, but when I started fooling around with some of the albums, songs, and artists that had been meaningful to my recent state of mind, its scope expanded. What started as a joke in my head about folklore vs evermore, and the anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s ultimate freedom vs love travelogue, Blue, ended as this musical rant that changed the way I saw the song. All these songs, albums and artists that had helped articulate what I was feeling, before I was able to put it into my own songs. It felt like a meditation on all the themes of the album, like the centerpiece all my songs were missing. And it was clear what the album would be called.”