Get ready to spread your wings! Pink Sky, the innovative LA-based duo, is set to send us all soaring with their highly anticipated album, “Everything You Feel Is Real”. This release signifies a new chapter in their musical journey, where they explore a diverse range of genres and challenge conventional sounds with authentic, heartfelt energy.
Building on their standout singles “Incinerating,” “Crystalline,” and “Faith,” this album delves deep into the raw and often messy aspects of being human. It confronts themes of transformation and resilience, reflecting the complexities of personal growth. Collaborating with the talented producer irreplica, Pink Sky crafts an immersive soundscape that is simply just theirs alone.
Join us as we dive into their creative process, uncover the inspiration behind their latest tracks, and discover how they are reshaping the music scene. Let’s get started!
How has your sound evolved from your earlier albums to “Everything You Feel Is Real”?
R: We’ve been releasing music since 2018, so this is our 6th album—and with nearly every release, our sound has become darker, thicker, and more tightly coiled. While “Everything You Feel Is Real” still holds space for soft, tender moments, every album has been more aggressive and angular than the last.
A: We’ve also evolved from being an entirely instrumental band for the first 3 albums to now making more indie-leaning songs with lyrics and vocals, more like what we both grew up listening to. I think that’s because we took each album as an opportunity to experiment and explore some new element, whatever we were most fascinated by at the time. In Forms, we experimented with hardware—synths and drum machines. In Everything You Feel Is Real, we got to experiment and play with vocals and getting into character.
What surprised you about working with irreplica, and how did it shape this album?
R: The biggest surprises about working with irreplica were how much we connected with his original source material, and also the total freedom he gave us with his material. Like, the starting point and premise for the project was total trust and complete confidence. His trust, along with the inspiring material he provided, allowed us to chase tangents into spaces we otherwise might not have, enabling significant creative and personal growth. Considering our band started as an instrumental project, it was unexpectedly liberating to contribute mostly vocals, lyrics, and production to an album, and for it to still feel authentic and emotionally rewarding.
As far as the creative process goes, how does it work for you as a Duo, where are your strengths and weaknesses?
R: As a duo, our biggest strength is our emotional connection. We’d been married for several years before we started playing music together, so we were already able to communicate in really intimate, subtle, and nonverbal ways. A few years into our marriage, we each had traumatic life experiences that changed our sense of identity and made communicating with words very difficult. When we started playing music together, it was like we found a new way to process, connect, and communicate in the most vulnerable and rewarding way possible. It felt like a sanctuary had been opened just for us, and we were writing our own healing, passing notes of love and pain back and forth. In that way, every album is simply a conversation we’ve been having about our feelings of love, loss, and awe. Creating music together has allowed us to fully process and embrace the hardest and most beautiful moments of our lives.
A: I’d agree that our bond and our ability to communicate in subtle nonverbal ways is our biggest strength. I’m sure we have weaknesses because creating is inherently challenging. Each project brings up some unique challenge, where something needs to be learned or improved. And, a big part of why we make music is because we’re curious, we love learning and creating, and are always trying to improve to get closer to our vision.
Can you share the themes of transformation and duality in the album and how they connect to your experiences?
The most difficult times of our lives brought us the most beautiful moments. The hardest times brought us the most growth.
“Incinerating” really sets the tone. Tell us a little bit about its origin and its role within the album as a whole.
R: Thanks! Incinerating is a personal favorite. I was really chasing a feeling on that one and felt like I captured it. Its origin is a bit different from the others in the way it was produced; rather than carefully adding onto irreplica’s source material as we did for most of the other songs, incinerating was born from a moment of total experimentation and reckless abandon wherein we chopped up the source material in a junkyard fever dream and experimented with different voices. In the end, we kept the drums but chopped the bass part for this song into tiny bits and reconstructed it. It is the least recognizable to the source material but also sounds the least like Pink Sky. I love it so much that sometimes I want to start a new band based just on this song.
With tracks like “Crystalline” contrasting “Incinerating,” how do you balance different emotional vibes on the album?
Because so much of our experience of life together has felt AWESOME/TERRIFYING, often all at once, all of our albums have a similar juxtaposition of heavy/light. It’s always felt natural and authentic to have this balance, especially because each album is simply our best attempt to process and release all our feelings from that time and place, so it feels like it would be dishonest to omit or diminish the range.
The visuals in the “Faith” music video are awesome! How important is the visual aspect of your music to the overall experience?
Thank you, but we take no credit for how amazing that video turned out—that’s all due to the director, dancer, choreographer, and the team of people supporting them! We’re both visual artists too, so the visual aspect of our music has always been integral to the overall experience. We perform with live visuals and our projector is basically a member of the band, like we’ve turned down shows where we couldn’t perform with our visuals. Also, we work with the most wonderful photographer/friend, Hwa-Jeen Na, who has created a stunning collection of photography for each of our albums to date.
As you explore resilience and self-discovery in your lyrics, how have your own struggles shaped your music?
Our music has been the sound of us processing and clearing our struggles, with each album going a layer deeper to scrape out the residual trauma. When we finished and released “Everything You Feel Is Real,” it felt like we had finally cleaned and healed the original wounds, and like we’ve been cleared for our next chapter.
What’s up next for Pink Sky Now?
R: Now it is time for us to surrender again, to uncoil, and to soften our edges as we venture into the unknown. We are settling into the hills of Los Angeles and returning to where the project began: performing long-form improvisational ambient music that makes us feel the beauty and the terror of existence. Right now the future feels wonderfully uncertain.
A: We also have a show coming up in LA in mid-October that we’ll be announcing soon, and we’ll be playing some songs off this album.
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