Alternative-pop quartet Ralph of London are pleased to announce the release of their upcoming EP ‘Yellow Sky Highway’ and leading single ‘White Bred Blues’ out now, alongside an interactive video game whereby players can win early access digital copies of both.
Currently based between London and the North of France, Ralph of London was formed in 2016 as a solo project by songwriter, drummer and producer Ralph Phillips who has spent the better part of his life developing various music, art and film projects in the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany and Japan, touring across Europe as a session musician for established artists such as Scritti Politti and Go-Kart Mozart as well as scoring soundtracks.
After putting out a handful of singles and recording his first full length album as Ralph of London, Ralph was invited to put a band together in the North of France and has since been working with musicians Léopold, François and Diane on developing Ralph of London’s now full-band live repertoire, and playing shows in both France and the UK. The group bring together synthesised rock and roll, West African polyrhythms and English folk fused into melodic pop songs that glance in on our fragmented social milieu from the sidelines.
Speaking about the album, vocalist and lyricist Ralph Phillips says, “Yellow Sky Highway serves as an introduction to the sonic palette we created throughout the last two years of development as a band. It’s a dystopian vision of our journey as a society into an environment characterised more by our waste than by the nature that once harnessed us. It’s a collection of five pop songs that are of this moment, that belong to the tapestry of our time, and that consequently unearth some of the problems we are least disposed to speak about as a society”
The EP’s leading single ‘White Bred Blues’ acts as a poem directed at the demographic Ralph felt he could most identify with. “It’s a song of despair really, knowing that we have smeared so much of our inherited nature with an obsession to possess, to control, to know, at the cost of alienating ourselves from some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. There is hope in it all though; through melody and repetition and groove we are able to liberate ourselves somewhat from the bleakness of our everyday realities,” states Ralph.
