dEUS

Keep You Close

dEUS return with a new album, Keep You Close is the follow up to 2008’s Vantage Point and was recorded at the band’s own studio in their home city of Antwerp over a six month period with producers David Botrill (Muse, Placebo, Tool) and Adam Noble. Keep You Close is, according to frontman, Tom Barman, “very passionate, but danceable. If Vantage Point was a vodka redbull, Keep You Close is a mojito.”

As the title suggests, Keep You Close sees lead singer and lyricist Tom Barman react to Vantage Point with a determination to return the band to a more personal lyrical style and a warmer musical approach. Whilst still immensely proud of Vantage Point, Tom felt that its follow up should move away from that album’s "very loud, in your face" sound. Consequently, much of the focus of Keep You Close has been to develop a sound that embraces a more organic and spacious dynamic. To aid this process, and in stark contrast to the studio bound writing approach of Vantage Point, the songs that make up Keep You Close were road tested live at festivals throughout the writing and recording period and developed through live rehearsals within the studio to, in Tom’s words, ensure that they were "more mature when it came to recording them".

Fans of dEUS will recognise the continuance of the band’s diverse musical template throughout the album, embracing rhythms that "go to your legs and your heart" as Tom puts it alongside their much vaunted mixing of diverse musical styles to create an album of multiple shades which remains a complete body of work. A chance visit to Antwerp by Afghan Whigs/Twilight Singers' Greg Dulli saw him visit the studio and lay down vocals for "The Dark Sets In", a coincidence made all the stranger by a conversation the previous day in which the band remarked that it would be perfect for his voice.

The band's story began in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1992, in a small but vibrant and incestuous alternative music scene, where each musician was as likely to be in five bands as one. A mutual love of all things alternative and underground melded five talented musicians and performers into dEUS. A band that spent the next twenty years producing a body of work that, chameleon-like, shifted through an array of musical styles and tones, a dazzling kaleidoscope that was eternally, indisputably and umistakably dEUS’s own. dEUS went on to record 5 albums between 1994 and 2008.