Rhye welcomes audiences Home with new album
Today, Rhye — the JUNO Award-winning project of Toronto-born, Los Angeles-based musician, Michael Milosh – welcomes audiences Home – the new album, out now on Last Gang Records. The highly anticipated record arrives with great acclaim as it presents timely focus to ‘home’ as being central to creativity and community.
Listen to the album everywhere here.
Home is the follow-up to 2019’s piano-driven, Spirit, and 2018’s JUNO Award-winning Blood (JUNO nominated for Adult Alternative Album of the Year, JUNO winner of Album Artwork of the Year). Milosh has been sharing his story and central themes on Home and its many sonic and physical facets through in-depth interviews with Kreative Kontrol, Le Soleil, Northern Transmissions, and CBC Metro Morning, with praise from Exclaim!, Vancouver Sun, The Independent and The New Yorker, amongst others. As presented on previous singles, Come In Closer, Black Rain, Beautiful, and Helpless, every element of Home is intentional and meant to reverberate on a higher extra-sensory plane. This sense of purpose is emphasized through the album’s visuals, all directed and produced by Milosh and partner Genevieve Medow-Jenkins.
Since the release of Rhye’s 2013 debut, Woman, Milosh mostly lived on the road, playing up to 100 shows a year and decamping in Toronto, Montreal, Thailand, the Netherlands, Germany and Los Angeles. On the heels of some major life changes,
including a new relationship with Medow-Jenkins, he yearned for a more permanent space, a balm for the restless spirit and a place to simply be. It’s familiar in its synthesis of propulsive beats, orchestral flourishes, piano ruminations and sultry, gender- nonconforming vocals, but never have they sounded more cohesive or alive.
Over the last two years, Milosh and Medow-Jenkins have produced a series of live events called Secular Sabbath, centered on consciousness-raising ambient music, meditation, massage and community, recently broadcast from their actual home throughout the pandemic. Acting as a space for Milosh’s improvisational experimentation with voice and sound, Secular Sabbath in turn inspired much of the work on this new record, creating a fluid correlation between music and home.
Written throughout 2019 and early 2020, Home was recorded at United Recording Studios, Revival at The Complex (Earth, Wind, & Fire), as well as Milosh’s home studio, and mixed by Alan Moulder (Nine Inch Nails, Interpol, My Bloody Valentine).
The album is bookended by celestial cantos sung by the Danish National Girls’ Choir, who Rhye performed with at a landmark concert in Denmark in 2017. The choir flew to LA to record with him for one day. It’s reflective of Milosh’s own experiences singing in choir as a boy, his entry point to the path that has informed his distinctive vocals. “I’m always trying to always accomplish musical goals that are connected to the way I listened to and interact with music as a child,” Milosh says. The sentiment also underscores a broader, less obvious, but no less important theme echoed through his new record: No matter where life takes us, we can always go home.