Copenhagen band CHOIR OF YOUNG BELIEVERS is the brainchild of founder Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, who founded the band after years of moving through the underground Danish indie scene.
The band is now repped by GHOSTLY International, which writes: “In 2006 [Jannis] moved to the Greek island of Samos and began developing his own solo material. Jannis returned to Copenhagen and, gathering musicians and friends around him, formed CHOIR OF YOUNG BELIEVERS, an orchestral-pop project marked by magisterial melodies, dark lyrical concerns, and a healthy dose of cathedral-grade reverb. The songs on CHOIR OF YOUNG BELIEVERS’ 2008 debut album ‘This Is For The White In Your Eyes‘ mixed modest folk arrangements with ambitious, grandiose indie pop, cooled with a stoic Nordic distance and glowing with an inner light. On their [latest] album ‘Rhine Gold‘, COYB expands on their debut in every way. Now a proper band, the collaborative dynamic has imbued their sound with more authority and daring, as COYB inhabits a wholly unique space where intimate folk, classic Krautrock, big-sky Americana, avant-garde composition and bombastic theatricality seamlessly serve the same master.”
This weekend COYB released their very first music video, directed by Anders Malmberg, and this morning the video was selected as NOWNESS’ prized daily hot pick. NOWNESS writes, “Playful watercolor animations and unexpected florals emerge amid a cast of anonymous characters in the video for ‘Paralyze,’ a krautrock-propelled track from CHOIR OF YOUNG BELIEVERS’ second album Rhine Gold … Directed by Anders Malmberg, today’s film is the band’s first foray into music videos, and sees the hauntingly melancholic vocals of frontman Jannis Noya Makrigiannis paired with a narrative spin. Shot in a defunct slaughterhouse in Copenhagen’s trendy, nightlife-heavy meatpacking district, Makrigiannis and Malmberg chose to use the longest, most complex track from the album. ‘In the beginning, I really needed to tame the song because it’s so wild and unorthodox in its structure,’ the filmmaker explains. ‘Once I tamed it — and maybe I never did — I could start creating the visual storyline, which was very much a search for timeless images, the painterly, the film as a sculptural idea and long, precise and transcendent shots.'”
For all things COYB, including links to all of their albums, be sure to visit their label GHOSTLY International. You can also follow COYB on Facebook and Twitter. And for more from director Anders Malmberg you can visit AndersMalmberg.dk.
