Sleepless in Zurich: Asleep.’s third album «Igloo» is a record about songwriting, a record about insomnia, but also a record about the dreamscapes of everyday life. 

Now you’ve turned thirty and you look back on your own youth („knew all types of snow, watched them fall and grow“). You grow crystals in a lab (“speak, crystal, speak”), exchange games for duties („wars are played, games are fought“) and struggle with deadlines („I’ve been awake for several weeks, handing in the first draft“), while you try to find yourself in the expectations of others („I can feel all the mes, that people see“).

And so you take the time you haven’t got and sing your laptop a lullaby. At three in the morning, drunk on fatigue and yet sleepless, a message in a bottle, encapsuled by the night. Most songs on «Igloo» were created like this: at night, when everything is dreaming, humming a tune alone before your computer and forwarding it to the band. Now and then somebody writes straight back, still awake, too. Because you don’t need to sleep to dream. Sometimes you even have to stay up all night to fuse the science of daily routine with the poetics of insomnia into a couple of dreamy pop songs.

Text: Stéphane Boutin

www.asleep.ch