It's 3 a.m. in Paris, and inside a packed club called L'International in the 11eme Arondissement, Pierre Bee, Simon Wangemann and Martin Wolf are being half-carried, half-torn apart by a breathless crowd, a crowd who don't want the night to end. It's an eclectic crowd, from grown-up professionals still in their suits from the working day to teenage girls who sneaked past the bouncers with fake Ids. The last hour was spent yelling the words to I Heart Sharks songs and dancing in a foray of flailing limbs and getting soaked with cheap wine flung from plastic glasses. Once the band finally makes it to the dressing room, Bee is the first to speak.“Well that escalated quickly”.
Tomorrow will be the final date of their European tour. It will bring what have been unforgettable two years to an end and mark the start of something very special. In the last days of summer of 2007, behind the thick concrete walls of Berlin's techno mecca, Berghain, three young men from three different countries met by chance and had an idea. They wanted to make machine music with a human soul, to use guitars as synthesisers, and synthesisers as guitars, to create something which could disprove the cynical muso opinion that music that moves your feet cannot move your mind, and vice versa. The idea became I Heart Sharks. What followed were four years of touring, playing everything from staircases to abandoned airport hangars, supporting acts from Friendly Fires to Natalia Kills on European tours, coupled with hours spent inside buses on the Autobahn and months in dark practice rooms in former East-German cellars. Nothing was static. In 2011 I Heart Sharks released their debut album, “Summer”, a collection of nostalgic songs sonically summarising the years on tour. The album was financed by fans who contributed to the project by purchasing memorabilia and memories ranging from lyric sheets to tickets to secret gigs.
As the audience grew, so did the venues. 2012 saw the band play three tours and a summer filled with shows, including Melt! Festival and the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund alongside Kraftklub, and not only performing at Berlin Festival, but providing the 2012 anthem for the latter with their faux-Deutsch tune “Neuzeit”. The second album – which will be their first outing on Island Records – was recorded with Hurts producer Joseph Cross in a disused textile mill in Manchester and in the former GDR radio headquarters in Berlin. The two cities with their important musical history provided a perfect parallel for the music; the northern British red-brick city with it's stormy skies and Factory Records' past meets the formerly split metropolis with it's relentless electronic music scene, Bowie recollections and karaoke bars. The record also saw I Heart Sharks work with 80s legend and Ultravox frontman Midge Ure, a unique way of binding their idea of music from the future with new-wave's golden years, integrating their influences into the actual fabric of the album. The result is as much a hybrid as the band itself – from the haunting synth-soaked soundscape of “Headlines” to the mechanically straight guitars and immense chorus of “The High Rise”. Bee's brittle urban poetry shines on a more confident platform of arrangements, the lyrics developing a life of their own within the music. “Karaoke” feels like a modern day take on Bowie's “Heroes”, a working-class ode to all of us who lie in the gutter but feel like stars, whilst “To Be Young” captures the exact point between optimism and melancholy in a sober look at how we worry about wasting our youth. A collection of luxury pop songs filled with Robert Smith-esque malaise, a soundtrack to a generation of people who were promised the world and received empty words. It's escapism in it's purest form, daringly ambitious pop music to violently tear you from the dreary quotidian and throw you into a world where promises are kept, where every day is summer and where they don't play Schlager on the radio. It's a balancing act on a tightrope between modern music of the Neuzeit, the New-Age, and the nostalgic tones of times past, a masterpiece of German engineering with a British heart and New York grit. These are urban anthems from the honest side of pop, where everyone from every walk of life is invited, and where all of us can still be heroes
