Artists – and labels – are forever looking for new ways to promote sales, and over time, the focus has changed, particularly since streaming became the dominant medium (while being the one that consistently yields the lowest returns). In the not-so distant past – the 80s and 90s – there would be a single or two ahead of the release of an album, and because the only way to hear the album was by buying it (or blagging it off a mate who had), people bought albums on the strength of the lead singles, and there would likely bee another one or two single after the album release to sustain interest and of course generate more radio play, which was, and remains a solid source for royalties. Of course, it never worked quite the same – at least in terms of radio play – for indie bands, but the principal remained broadly the same: albums have always provided better margins.
REM and Michael Jackson’s labels both milked their biggest albums for every single they could, while in contrast Mansun – probably much to the irritation of EMI – insisted on releasing EPs, and in doing so effectively gate away at least an entire album in B-Sides, while The Wedding Present released a single a month for a year then put them all out on a compilation album.
This is effectively the strategy Canadian trio Burn the Louvre are employing in the run-up to their debut, with ‘Dumb’, released in August, being the eighth single from ‘Silhouettes’ out at the end of the year.
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The difference perhaps being that now it’s all about streams, and people are more about ‘songs’ or ‘tracks’ than albums, one could argue that ‘Silhouettes’ will be a collection of twelve tracks rather than an album, but anyway.
‘Dumb’ is worthy of its title with some of its corny couplets, like the opening lines ‘My door was open, but she still knocked / She was electric but I wasn’t shocked’, and it’s a kinda jangly, slacker punk-pop with a country-rock twist that’s catchy with its repetitive refrain that suggests they’re maybe not as dumb as we may think they are.
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