Ears Wide Open: Always You

Kevin Bronson on May 19th, 2021

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Twins Anton and Christoph Hochheim made a swoon-worthy album in 2016 under the name Ablebody. That record, “Adult Contemporaries,” stylishly dressed ’60s and ’70s pop in an ’80s shimmer.

The brothers, who between them have played with the likes of the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Depreciation Guild, Jerry Paper and Beach Fossils, among others, are back after five years away, and now they’re working as Always You.

This week the duo announced that the first Always You album, “Bloom Off the Rose,” will be out July 16 via Shelflife/Discos de Kirlian. Not that the brothers have changed their musical stripes — the album’s early singles have a dusky, melancholic glow beneath Christoph’s croon. File under: hopeful anthems for the hopelessly romantic.

“The subject matter is life as vignettes,” Christoph says of the album, made with bassist Jordan Sabolick, producer Lucas Nathan (aka Jerry Paper) and mixing/mastering by Kenny Gilmore and Josh Bonati. “Snapshots and stories of my relationships, mainly the one I’m just coming out of, as viewed from different moments in our timeline, often projected imagined futures and mourning losses yet to come.”

The latest single is “Black City Nights,” which more than lives up to its noir-ish title. “‘Black City Nights’ is a song for the disheveled and defeated, a vivid depiction of long sleepless nights, chasing ghosts of one’s past and future, lost bets and blind optimism that the next big break is just around the corner,” Christoph says. “It’s about loneliness and what people do to escape it, as well as the hopefulness that keeps us pushing through.”

In the video, directed by Nathan Castiel and co-starring Dawna Lee Heising and Nathan, the brothers portray limousine drivers, mundanely ferrying riders round town, subjected to living their “night life” on the outside looking in.

||| Watch: The video for “Black City Nights”