The Swimmers

“To start again, we’re the lucky ones” opens “Shelter,” the first track on People Are Soft, with the sound of a band reinventing itself. Philadelphia’s The Swimmers are set to release People are Soft on November 3, 2009 via MAD Dragon Records (ADA), a towering, vulnerable sophomore album that is a debut in its own right.

Following 2008’s Fighting Trees—The Swimmers’ first release on MAD Dragon which garnered rave reviews from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Magnet, The Tripwire and Time Out Chicago, making their Artist to Watch and Top Ten Year End Polls—Steve and Krista Yutzy-Burkey, Scott French and Rick Sieber decided to make a clean break, build a home studio from the ground up and record an album entirely themselves. The result is intensely personal songwriting couched in distorted synthesizer hooks, crushed electric guitars and swelling reverb trails. “It was a very focused and isolated time. Scott and I traded back and forth, refining and affecting the mixes…I think we all journeyed pretty deep inside ourselves during the project,” said lead singer/songwriter Steve Yutzy-Burkey.

From “Hundred Hearts”—Scott’s ode to the trials of the human heart with an insatiably catchy gang chorus—to “Drug Party”—a dream sequence of social disconnection set to overblown distorted guitar and brash snare hits—to “What This World Is Coming To”—a diffuse atmosphere alternating with quirky, pounding choruses—to the apocalyptic electro-pop of Krista’s lead vocal on “Give Me the Sun,” to “Nervous Wreck’s” triumphant chorus “sing without and hold together,” the songs are isolated and comforting, difficult and alluring, fractured and fragile…People Are Soft.