Love Me/Love Me Not
Honne
LPA
- I Might
- Me & You
- Day 1
- I Got You
- Feels So Good
- 306
LPB
- Location Unknown
- Crying Over You
- Shrink
- I Just Wanna Go Back
- Sometimes
- Forget Me Not
HONNE have today released their much-anticipated second album, ‘Love Me / Love Me Not’. The band’s extensive worldwide tour also continues this month, with a UK headline tour (including a massive show at London’s Brixton Academy) kicking off in November.
An effortlessly-accomplished step forward, the split concept of ‘Love Me / Love Me Not’ has been unveiled this year via the unusual plan to drop two tracks on the last Friday of every month (crystallising in the final drop – and the release of the full album on beautiful vinyl – today). It’s a fitting framework for a record which captures the duality of life’s ups and downs: half the tracks explore life’s positives – love, nostalgia and contentment (Love Me ◑) and the other half life’s great difficulties – heartbreak, anxiety and grief (Love Me Not ◐). With a sound and message that travels far and wide, HONNE’s is a truly modern success story, which has seen them develop an impassioned global audience: see over half a billion streams, sold-out tours, and several surprises along the way (like a triple-platinum album in South Korea).
‘Love Me / Love Me Not’ features contributions from a diverse cast of collaborators, ranging from Tom Misch, Anna of the North, Nana Rogues (who produced Drake’s ‘Passionfruit’) and Georgia. The record remains, though, distinctly HONNE’s own, a band whose sometimes-awkward, always-positive portraits of 21st century romance, masculinity and modern city living have seen them bring together a diverse community. And despite testing new boundaries, ‘Love Me / Love Me Not’ ultimately sees the band’s earliest ambitions come into even clearer focus. They cite the group’s name (“Honne” meaning your true feelings, those you keep to yourself), the name of their early record label (“Tatemae”, which reflects what you display in public), plus the fact that this dichotomy between an online persona and actual reality has become starker since when they first started making music. “Those two sides have been rooted in us from the beginning, but now is the first time we’ve truly demonstrated it. One doesn’t exist without the other, and so this time these songs have to be there together. A lot of films and TV shows either explore the good or bad, but we wanted to show a balance and the grey space.” And it’s in those in-between spaces that HONNE have truly found themselves, and a work of timely, timeless songwriting.
