Astral Brain

Swedish indie pop duo Astral Brain combine warm synths, bubbling electronic textures, and candy-coated vocals into a swirling psychedelic mixture that's perfect for drifting and dreaming. Not a million miles away from Broadcast at their poppiest, the band's debut album, The Bewildered Mind, was released in 2021.

The Stockholm-based group got its start when Einar Ekström's previous band Le Futur Pompiste splintered in the early 2010s, leaving him with no outlet for his songs or production work. He started working on music on his own, drawing inspiration from library music and soundtracks of the '70s, vintage psychedelia, light electronica, and space age pop. He decided he needed a singer to realize his artistic vision and found a kindred spirit in Siri af Burén, who had performed with Testbild! The pair began working on songs, trading ideas back and forth via the computer with Ekstrom playing all the instruments and af Burén providing vocal melodies and words. The first music to be released was April 2019's "From Above"/"Field Trip," which was followed later in the year by the song "Five Thousand Miles." The band caught the ear of Shelflife Records and their first album, The Bewildered Mind, was released by the label in late 2021. Made up of a mixture of songs dating back a couple decades and some newly written for the release, the album also contains reworked versions of the tracks already issued as singles.

-Tim Sendra, AllMusic