Like many an album in the past year or two, Allie Alvarado’s boisterous and powerful ‘Strong EP’ as recorded and inspired by a life in the pandemic. Recorded alongside friends and past bandmates, ‘Strong’ is an eccentric piece of experimental electronic music that’s absolutely delectably melodic but also impeccably produced from back to front.
Allie started sketching out the music while she was still touring with Beth Ditto and visiting her old bandmates during time off in Berlin. “We had played in a band together called Eystek and our sound was experimental and noisey with a lot of textures and dynamics. Something about being with them again was taking me back to that time, and going to clubs to hear so much amazing electronic music was engaging me creatively.”
The resulting record feels like an earth shattering experience from back to front. The first piece itself, ‘Strong’, jumps across so many different and vivid highs and lows, glitches and flows. The beat drops are unexpected both in timeliness but also in the sheer audacity of their metallic feel and nature. It’s a defiantly futuristic record, but not at any moment feeling like something pretentious or outrageously audacious without reason. There’s an assuredness and measured approach that Alvarado deploys. Each piece is arranged with so much purpose and poignance.
The more ballad-esque piece ‘Syllables of Love’ feels like a coating, an entire warm cushion slowly forcing itself around you more and more till you’re suffocated in some sort of dark warmth. Then there are more earth shattering moments on ‘Feel the Earthquake’, an ominous and towering piece that crashes onto you with such verve.
An electronic pop record that’s distinctively unique, the Strong EP is well worth any electronic fans attention. Sublimely produced and imaginatively conceived, it’s a sonic expedition unlike any other.