Montag - MEMORI feat. Erika Spring

Many, many years ago, I was in a car with my older brother, and he mentioned an interview he’d read with a band where they said they might never put out an album again. Albums, according to that band, were done with, and they would probably just stick to singles or EPs. I don’t recall who the band were, and they were just stating the obvious, but I couldn’t really fathom it then – I had probably only just turned 14, still hadn’t heard of iTunes and hadn’t realised that 7“s and 12“s had been the norm for many groups since the dawn of recorded music. Either way, I remember wondering how a band could possibly make a definitive artistic statement without an album – I probably didn’t think about it in those exact terms, admittedly, but I remember thinking that CD singles and EPs weren’t really enough.

For the past few years I’ve gotten so used to music being heard and distributed in such a variety of new ways that I’d forgotten that back in that car, my brain couldn’t even imagine any sophisticated format other than the album. I was reminded of this today, when I heard that Montag, the musical alias of Antoine Bédard, was in ‘Phase 10’ of his 12 month-long digital single series, and it seems like such an elegant solution to my problem. Here, you have twelve tracks – enough to fill an album – presented in a way that’s both interesting and original. It’s funny to think that I couldn’t even imagine that the band could have just been talking about something as simple as this back then.

MEMORI is a collaboration with Bédard’s longtime friend Erika Spring of Au Revoir Simone and is a nostalgic love song that is, lyrically, about “traveling the world, feeling invincible, about being in different places at once”. The single’s b-side, MEMORI Encore, starts crossing a far more stripped back terrain. Listen to it below.