Joyful Death

1. Let The Light In (feat. Douglas Dare)
2. WKND (feat LIZ)
3. Don't Wanna dance With You (feat Aisha Zoe)
4. Sweat (feat LIZ)
5. X Hopeless Romantic (Feat Little Boots)
6. Remember To Forget Me (feat Chester Lockhart)
7. Joyful Death (feat Tyler Mather Oyer)
8. Remember 2 Forget Me (Piano Version) (feat Douglas Dare)

Sonikku release their new LP Joyful Death via Bella Union. “I love songs that make you want to cry and dance at the same time,” says Tony Donson, the London-based musician who records as 

Sonikku. That sense of unfettered release and liberation drives his new album, Joyful Death. A fluent, fertile and full-colour hybrid of vibrant Italo-house, liquid synth-pop, righteous disco and French philosophical asides, it’s an album that signals the emergence proper of Sonikku – a fully formed dancefloor artist. It’s also a farewell of sorts, perhaps, but with an emphatic rebirth at its heart. 

A fully realised, coherent pop record that showcases my craft as a song-writer and producer.” Total control of his craft is swiftly asserted on Let the Light In, where the influences of lost-in-music disco and the Pet Shop Boys merge under vocals from immersive, exploratory British singer-songwriter Douglas Dare. The pace accelerates as WKND gets into a groove pitched somewhere between Madonna, Daft Punk and Indeep, with LA future-pop singer LIZ primed for dancefloor abandon on vocals. Meanwhile, Sonikku’s independent intent is firmly asserted on the freestyle-inspired Don’t Wanna Dance with You, where singer Aisha Zoe coolly brushes off unwanted advances in favour of dancefloor pleasures. Liz assumes vocal duties again for Sweat, a song fully equipped to make dancefloor devotees do as its title suggests. Dreamily melodic evidence of Sonikku’s dynamism (and love of melancholy Swedish electro-pop queen Robyn) beckons on X Hopeless Romantic, where Little Boots contributes a sweetly loved-up vocal over a sublimely infectious chorus. Pummelling synths signal a dramatic shift of pace on the almost electro-darkwave dash of Remember to Forget Me, where actor/singer Chester Lockhart presides over a summit meeting between Depeche Mode and New Order. Performance artist Tyler Matthew Oyer takes the vocals for the Italo-disco-inspired title-track, a vividly imagined album manifesto – of sorts – inspired to varying degrees by an 1892 poem, French thinker Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “body without organs” and a 1997 anime called The End of Evangelion. Finally, that grand piano takes over as Dare returns, presiding over an achingly stripped-back version of Remember to Forget Me. 

Joyful Death is a hugely confident and self-contained leap forward for Sonikku.