The follow-up to Calum’s acclaimed sophomore album Bridges…
Today, multi-platinum-selling singer/songwriter Calum Scott announces the forthcoming release of his new album Avenoir on September 12th via EMI, available to pre-order here.
The artist’s third full-length features his brand-new single “God Knows“, a wildly romantic and epic tale premiering today. With his powerful voice and soul-baring songwriting, Calum creates the kind of deeply resonant songs that are primed to accompany the most meaningful moments in our lives.
From weddings to end-of-life rituals, fans have turned to his music to soundtrack major life events and for solace in times of heartbreak and loss. To date, Calum’s music has amassed over 10 billion streams worldwide. As Calum reveals, the new LP borrows its title from John Koenig’s ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’, a word-construction project that defines Avenoir as “the desire that memory could flow backwards.”
Avenoir refers to how we move through life like a rower, always moving forward but facing backwards, seeing where we’ve been, but not where we’re going. On the album, Calum explains, “The songs on this album speak to both regret and sorrow and to undying love — a plea to live life to its fullest.
‘While writing the album, I asked myself, ‘If I could, would I choose to be able to see what’s coming?’ I truly believe we are made from our successes and our challenges, from adapting and overcoming. The concept of Avenoir challenges all of us to live in the present, serving as a constant reminder that it is the surprises in life and the not knowing that makes life terrifying, but also truly magical.”
A perfect entry point into Avenoir’s unbridled emotionality, “God Knows” brings Calum’s stunning and soulful voice to an intimate yet grandiose expression of longing and remorse. “This song came from a pretty rough patch in a relationship and is for anyone out there who has made mistakes, said things in anger or upset, or who has pushed people away,”
Calum further explains. “Sometimes we don’t realise what we have until it’s gone. I wrote “God Knows” as an unapologetic and desperate act of love to want to make things right again. When I’m writing songs, I like to take sayings or phrases that we say sometimes without thinking, but that hold so much depth and power so that, in a short few words, people can understand it wholeheartedly. Exploring that in “God Knows” helped remind me just how human we all are.”
Produced by Calum’s frequent collaborator Jon “MAGS” Maguire & The Nocturns (Jax Jones, Tiësto) and partly created at Real World Studios, a recording complex founded by the legendary Peter Gabriel in Bath, God Knows offers a dazzling glimpse into Avenoir’s more adventurous and exhilarating sonic landscape. After opening on a stark arrangement of piano and vocals, the track morphs into a majestic piece of pop/rock, unfolding in fuzzed-out textures and heart-pounding rhythms as Calum pleads for forgiveness. God Knows builds to a showstopping key change at the bridge — a tremendous vocal feat executed by Calum with equal parts masterful precision and exquisitely raw feeling.
