It was on the 1st January 2016, during the release of their debut album, Young. Independently of
each other, Peter Paul Aufreiter and Johannes Mandorfer sent sound snippets over to
Hearts Hearts’ singer David Österle. Within the same hour, he’d received an aggressive jazzy
piano loop—‘Phantom’—and an electronic drum take recorded overseas in ‘Island’ (the German
word for the country of Iceland). Österle frantically began attempting to put these disparate pieces
together; to synchronize what was never meant to be unified, and start singing over the results.
Produced by mastermind Peter Paul Aufreiter, the new record conjures a mix of anguish and
ecstasy, whether it’s the funky falsetto of ‘Sugar / Money’, or digital monster ballad ‘Do you often
think about /’. Taking inspiration from the leftfield pop productions of Bon Iver, Jamie XX, and
Son Lux, they skew addictive hooks into drippy song chambers, littering them with lucid samples
and cybernetic production licks, conjoining contrasting elements with prisms of electronics and
lush acoustic instrumentation.
