Saccades

Saccades, AKA Nicholas Wood - one half of The KVB - returns with the announcement of his new album ‘Land of The Hearth,’ releasing on exciting new imprint Old World - New World Recordings on 25 August. Pre-order the album here. Today, he also shares the first track to be lifted from the album, ‘New Star Line,’ alongside a music video.

In 2017, Wood unveiled the Saccades project with an eponymous debut album; a record which saw the KVB’s gloomy atmospherics and glacial walls-of-sound swapped out for stripped-back psychedelic guitars. The follow-up to that debut, ‘Flowing Fades’, landed in April 2021.

Now, he returns with news of his new record ‘Land of the Hearth’, the title taken from a passage by Jonathon Meades, will be the third record from Saccades. Tipping his hat to house music, ‘Land of the Hearth’ puts synths and good times to the foreground, accompanied by dreamy vocals and carefree guitars.

The first single to be lifted from the album, ‘New Star Line’ is a heady cocktail of pulsing low rhythms topped with swirling, shimmering synths. Combining elements of sun-tinged house and a tranquil balearic bounce, there's also a cyclic and psychedelic nature to the track. Disarming and captivating, ‘New Star Line’ pulls the listener into Saccades dreamscape, with otherworldly vocals provided by Kat Day, the other half of The KVB.

On the track, Wood offers: “This track emerged from a late night synth jam that I recorded with Kat in late 2021. It remained unfinished and forgotten on my computer for over a year, until one night it returned to me in a dream, where the main synth riff was playing over and over. When I located the unfinished jam the next day, I set out on capturing that dreamlike feeling, by adding Kat’s ethereal vocal and by making it feel like a piece of music that could loop forever, taking the listener on a journey into an endless night.”

Alongside the track comes a video, filmed on an abandoned fort in the middle of the Mediterranean. Speaking on the video, Wood continues: “As well as collaborating on the track, Kat also made the video with me. We discovered a remote and abandoned Mediterranean outpost - a modern ruin trapped between the mountain and the sea which felt like the both end and the edge of the world. For me, the location perfectly captured the other-worldly and dreaminess of the track. A place where you could embody the endless loop of the music.”

Wood is best known as making up one half of The KVB with his wife Kat Day. Signed to Geoff Barrow of Portishead and Beak’s Invada Records, over the last ten years the critically-acclaimed duo have picked up a loyal international fanbase and toured pretty much non-stop around Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and South Africa.