Synth-pop artist Sally Dige (“Dee-Ah”) will release her sophomore LP Holding On via DKA Records in the US on September 8th and Avant! in Europe on September 13th. The Danish-Canadian audio visual artist began work on the record back in 2016, but in a recent interview with Self-Titled, she explains that the tracks on the album went thru several painful iterations before finding their direction. She says,
“It was a weird process of struggling for a long time with how to work with the songs, and reworking them and then reproducing them and dwelling on them; but then near the end, I got into this habit of when I felt really low about a track, I would go and delete everything except the vocals and start fresh, and then it came together really fast.”
Dige goes on to say that she wrote the album’s namesake, “Holding On” during a period in which she felt she was losing her “mind and losing all hope in everything.” Using a minimal set-up of synthesizer and voice, the musician makes maximal use of track layering to create a saturated and detailed sound. Lacing propulsive drum tracks with her bouncing vocal samples gives “Holding On” a real head spinning quality, and her lush melodies are replete with strings, bells, pads, and chimes. This sonic density of detail is met by Dige’s bronze-toned voice, and it lends the cut the kind of yearning melancholy evident in her pained depiction of its’ origins.
