After their critically acclaimed record « Three Times Dead » released in 2008 on Everest Records, Hemlock Smith & Les Poissons Autistes return, collaborating this time with Arnaud Ivan Sponar aka Goodbye Ivan.

As this on-going project developed to a very different mood and style, they gave it a new name. Things are rarely what they seem. This is not album about maritime disasters. Nor is it about UBoats during WWII. It’s a record made by four people, quite safely in their respective homes. As three of them live in Switzerland and one in Brooklyn, NY, a long distance collaboration with file transfers ensued, over a three-year period. In the end, it became an album not unlike a long-distance relationship; it’s about separation and loss, about the fact that life is hard and that, if we don’t look after one another, it can be lonely. It was recorded on a whim. It was improvised and also carefully thought out. It turned out totally different from what the band first
expected, but their three separate influences combined brought them into uncharted territory. Try to imagine Columbus staring into the night somewhere in October 1492. Or Frederick Fleet, Titanic lookout, trying to spot the iceberg that would kill them all, except him…

The music goes back and forth between spectral folk, twisted chamber music and heavy-burdened torch songs. Mostly acoustic instruments were used but laptops weren’t forbidden. Some friends helped but mostly, it was four guys writing musical letters to distant shores.

They called this project « The Worst » because it’s the name of one song, because the lyrics often deal with the dark sides of ourselves and because these tunes really are the worst transatlantic death songs ever ; they’re actually about the difficulty of living and they’re certainly not about maritime disasters. Or are they ? As mentioned earlier, things are rarely what they seem.