New Hampshire band, Vattnet Viskar, announced earlier this month the release of their sophomore full-length album Settler which created some controversy with their seemingly not-so-kvlt cover art, which actually is an interpretative photograph of Christa McAuliffe, one of of the seven crew members killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.
Frontman, Nick Thornbury explains:
I found this Christa McAuliffe photo that ended up being the basis for the entire album musically and visually. I literally stared at that photo for months playing guitar. It’s a photo of her in a zero-gravity chamber and she looks so alive and glowing. It’s one of the most conflicted things I’ve ever seen: to be so happy, at the peak of life, only to have it all gone right after. The cover is an interpretation of that photo. I take from it that being meant to do something meaningful in your life isn’t always going to go the way it’s planned. Being on a path that you cannot stray from, even though you know that the end of the path is your destruction and the destruction of everything you know, you must do it, and you would choose no other way to live. Christa was from Concord, New Hampshire, the town that I live in. One of my first memories is the Challenger mission’s demise, so it’s a personal thing for me. But the album isn’t about the explosion, it’s about everything else. Pushing to become something else, something better, a transformation and touching the divine.
The first single from their upcoming LP was premiered today via Stereogum and can be heard below.
Settler will be released on June 6th. through Century Media
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrFxKXtkPfw[/youtube]
