SOFT LOFT - THE PARTY AND THE MESS

Imagine a space where the imperfect and the broken about you is not only embraced, but celebrated. Imagine rapture wrought out of melancholy – a taste sweeter than homemade raspberry jam. Imagine you lived in a world where radical self love and self acceptance was the catalyst and glue as per how we relate to one another and the type of relationships we choose to forge. With their debut album titled The Party and the Mess, Soft Loft deliver twelve gorgeous, reverb-drenched tunes with hooks for days, which revel in these type of musings. From Ash through Velvet, Sky, Shady Neon, Cobalt, Midnight, all the way down to Ocean – this album traverses a sprawling, rich palette of blue, with occasional blasts of the warm, fluorescent and peachy. Listening to it feels like all sorts of waves breaking and rolling out, washing over you. It’s an immersive experience and it feels so…

Music is a safe space. It doesn’t judge, it speaks directly to you, and it offers a place to hide whenever you want to escape reality and just feel things through. – Jorina Stamm

They started working on the material back in 2021. They made it “a thing” to convene in safe spaces and to create them wherever they went. One of their favourite places to hole up in was a cozy little house in Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Cut off from the outside world, often for days at a time, they would get lost in music and the bottomless well of late night conversations, and the magic would just happen. Although the voice you hear on these songs is that of Jorina Stamm (and it is she who wrote the melodies and the lyrics), the ideas for these songs came from just about everybody in the band. On occasion, all of them together – just messing-around during rehearsals, jamming. By the time Grammy-nominated producer Gianluca Buccellati (Lana Del Rey, Arlo Parks) joined them at the studio, they’d written 30 songs! Recalling this session, which took place in a snowed-in house in Engelberg, Jorina says, “We’ve never recorded music as fast as we did with Luca, and we had so much fun doing it.” She continues, “We didn’t strive for perfection, we just hung out and played. It was very familial, personal, and very straight up.”

The phrase "The Party And The Mess," which became a song and the album title, comes from my grandmother. When I used to visit her at her retirement home, she would tell me that when she knows it's time to go, she wants to put on her favorite red dress and throw a big party with lots of champagne! So, on the one hand, it’s a tribute to her, but it's also an ode to life: the big party and mess of it all. – Jorina Stamm

The Party and the Mess sounds like an intimate conversation between dear friends, and you, as the listener, are allowed to listen in on it. There’s also something about the ease with which everybody is playing, and how the individual instruments weave together to support the voice and the emotions that it channels – it feels so damn good. If there is a single word to describe this feeling, or what it evokes, this word is probably trust! And not just any ol' trust, but a deep and unconditional one.