YEARS & YEARS MAKE A SPECTACULAR RETURN WITH BRAND NEW VIDEO AND TRACK, “SANCTIFY.”
AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE NOW
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Years & Years are back today with an explosive new track, “Sanctify,” the first taste of their hugely anticipated forthcoming sophomore album to be released via Interscope Records. This follows the band’s celebrated debut record “Communion,”
which reached #1 in the UK and went on to sell over 1.5 million copies
worldwide, scored 4 platinum singles, 5 BRIT Award nominations, sold-out
headlining tours across North America and concluded with a sold-out
date at London’s Wembley Arena.
Watch the official video for “Sanctify” HERE.
More details of Years & Years’ forthcoming album – together with the first official single – will follow soon.
“Sanctify” is a bold leap forward in sound and vision from Years & Years,
a band intuitively connected to great, homespun British pop classicism,
but now standing bolt upright on the world stage. If there is a ghostly
shadow sitting over “Sanctify,” it is arguably that of 13-year-old Olly Alexander listening to Britney’s “Slave 4 U”
his bedroom, playing back the experience at full adult pop throttle.
Their second album, thrillingly, also marks a new frontier in every
sense of the world, as Olly explains:
“I want to take people on a wild and wonderful adventure
through my dreams to a world that’s very different from our own. I’ve
been thinking about this place for a long time, a place to tell stories
from; about identity, sexuality, celebrity and performance. The video
for “Sanctify” centers around an audition against the backdrop of a
future metropolis called Palo Santo. It’s the first part of a bigger
jigsaw puzzle and my hope is that it confuses the hell out of people but
also excites them in a mysterious and sensual way. We’ve deliberately
hidden lots of different meanings and I want people to come up with
their own interpretations, I’m asking people to jump down the rabbit
hole with me and let their imagination run free. The thing I love most
about pop music has always been fantasy and escapism so I thought, ‘well
I guess I should try and be the pop star I want to see in the world and
make the most ambitious and freaky and sexy thing possible’. I’m making
these videos because I want to let people inside my brain and because I
love living in my own fantasy world (always have, always will) – a
place where sexuality and gender are blurred and magic is real. We live
in a chaotic and accelerating world, we’re looking at depictions of the
future to help us make sense of what’s happening right now. This is my
vision of a possible future, one that makes us question what it means to
be a human.”
With their debut album Years & Years made a palpable new tribal impact on pop, where the minority is always the majority; and in Olly Alexander
they also have a once-in-a-generation front-man, who understands more
than most his responsibility as a pop star. Part full-blooded, escapist
fantasia and part social comment, for Years & Years this is about outlier pop as futurism once more, offering solutions when the world around is failing you.
“Sanctify” acts as its dizzying first glimpse, and a tantalizing window into Years & Years’ surprising, deeply personal and otherworldly comeback. Or, as Olly puts it: “What I love so much about being in Years and Years is
this fantasy that I’m allowed to live in. Anything can happen,
everyone’s welcome and everyone’s safe. That’s the deal. So why not keep
it going in that direction?”