Logjam Presents is pleased to welcome Milky Chance for a live in concert performance at The ELM on Monday, August 7, 2023.
Tickets are on sale now at The ELM Box Office, online or by phone at 1 (800) 514-3849. Reserved balcony loge seating, reserved premium balcony seating, and general admission standing room tickets are available. All ages are welcome.
Additional ticketing and venue information can be found here.
“When you feel that perfect synchronization with someone, it’s almost as if nothing else matters,” says Milky Chance guitarist/singer Clemens Rehbein. “Your worries, your anxieties, they just disappear, and all that’s left is love.”
Love’s inevitable triumph over fear lies at the heart of Milky Chance’s intoxicating new single, “Synchronize,” which feels tailor made for the times as it searches for a balance between existential dread and sentimental idealism. “Smoke in the sky got me feeling so blue / Burning down the city while I’m here with you,” Rehbein sings, evoking a year of catastrophic wildfires among other obvious signs of climate change. “Smoke in the sky and I’m holding you tight / Because I love the way we synchronize.” Recorded with fellow duo DECCO, the track is at once vintage and modern, layering a sunny ’60s melody atop a driving electro-pop rhythm section. The band’s performance, meanwhile, is nothing short of mesmerizing, fueled by breezy guitars, ethereal synthesizers, and a pulsating four-on-the-floor backbeat that grounds the whole thing in a relentless forward momentum. Add it all up and you’ve got a dark, dreamy take on the power of human connection, one that breaks fresh sonic ground as it finds comfort and escape in a lover’s embrace.
“We’re always trying to surprise ourselves in the studio,” says bassist/percussionist Phillipp Dausch. “You can get tunnel vision being constantly on the road, but we’ve had a lot more time at home these past few years, and having a break like that really helps you find some fresh perspective.”
Indeed, Milky Chance have been in perpetual motion ever since the release of their star-making debut single, “Stolen Dance.” Recorded at Rehbein’s childhood home in Kassel, Germany, the track became an international juggernaut after the band posted it online in 2013, topping charts in more than a dozen countries before crossing the Atlantic and hitting #1 on the Billboard Alternative Chart. In the years that followed, the group would go on to release three critically acclaimed full-length studio records, rack up more than five billion streams, headline massive sold-out concerts around the world, perform on nearly every late night television show, and play iconic festivals from Coachella and Lollaplooza to Bonnaroo and ACL. The duo’s latest single, “Colorado,” proved to be yet another smash, amassing nearly 100 million streams across platforms and anchoring the band’s surprise 2021’s release, Trip Tape, which featured a mix of originals, covers, demos, and remixes.
“It’s often just the two of us writing and producing,” says Dausch, “but we had such good chemistry with DECCO on ‘Colorado’ that we knew we wanted to collaborate with them again on ‘Synchronize.’ Music is all about communication and connection, and working with other people put us in touch with parts of ourselves that we’d never really explored before.”
Pushing themselves in the studio naturally led Dausch and Rehbein to push themselves in other aspects of their careers, as well. Already industry leaders with their Milky Change initiative, which promotes eco-consciousness and sustainability in the music industry by planting trees to offset the carbon footprint of touring, the band decided to make the leap and go fully independent in 2021, launching their own Muggelig Records label.
“Running our own label gives us the ability to be just as creative with how we get the music out to people as we are with how we make it,” says Dausch.
“There’s more responsibility,” adds Rehbein, “but there’s a lot more freedom, too.”
Milky Chance have come a long way over the past ten years, and while our collective fate may feel more uncertain than ever these days, one thing’s for sure: love will always be stronger than fear.
About Mallory Merk
Mallory Merk’s music is animated by a youthful spirit, and it possesses the hard-won wisdom of a person who’s packed a lot of life into a short time. The 21-year-old, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter has experienced sudden fame, world travels, addiction, recovery, and heartbreak. Her music reveals a boundless enthusiasm for life, that’s deeply entwined with a sixth-sense knowledge of how the world and the people inhabiting it work. With her latest project, Thorns, she’s ready to double down on her true calling: writing metaphor-rich songs that reflect her unique experiences while inspiring listeners to begin figuring out their own truths.
On Thorns, Mallory draws on the starlit desert landscape of Joshua Tree, where she recorded much of the project, as well as her own ups and downs, branching out sonically from the chilled-out pop R&B that made 2021’s Counterparts such an inviting listen. Analog synths and a string section add to the tension of the world-weary “Fading Lines,” while the storming goth-tinged rocker “We’re Not the Same” finds Mallory howling as if there’s a full moon overhead. She’s grown as a lyricist as well, writing from different personas while exploring the inner workings of the human mind with grace and sly wit.
“I’m a writer at heart,” she says. “On Counterparts, I was showing my musicianship and how I can create songs. But Thorns is more about my writing.”
The loose-limbed title track, a rebuke of femininity’s confines, shows how far Mallory has come since Counterparts. It opens with a stunning image: “She’s melting hearts if they’re made of plastic,” she sings over arpeggiated guitars, “burning arrow since the Renaissance.” Mallory’s strong belief in staying true to yourself led to this line, whose sneaky ambiguity speaks to the song’s themes of personal liberation. “Being a truly authentic person will melt everyone’s heart,” she asserts. “In a good way or a bad way.”
Born in Louisiana and raised in New Jersey, Mallory has been figuring out who she could be since her teens when she went from modeling for Pat McGrath and Rihanna to focusing full-time on sharpening her pop craft. Her 2020 debut EP, Strangers, was her first major work with producer Dan Farber (Lizzo, Tkay Maidza). She then released 2021’s Counterparts, which unveiled her evolving songwriting and musicianship on tracks like the slinky pop-soul throwback “Just Because” and fan favorite “Sinister.”
Mallory and Dan worked on the core of what would become Thorns at the Joshua Tree studio of engineer Christopher Thorne. “Dan and I just stared at the stars at night and wrote songs,” she says. “It was very spiritual and less about trying to ‘create’ anything.” Back in Los Angeles, they honed the tracks that became Thorns at The Village Studios in West Los Angeles. “The songs, I believe, are very me,” she says. “They don’t sugarcoat anything.”
As a result, the title track, “Thorns,” is a new type of protest song, one that’s made for thrilling sing-alongs in cars cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway as well as cathartic solo sessions in cozy bedrooms. The chorus—wailed in unison by Mallory and her friends Kaien Cruz and Solly—is so triumphant that you can practically hear their collective fists in the air: “Perfection’s never what I stood for/Spliff hanging out the window of my two-door.” Their realization that they’re still making sense of the world serves as a catalyst for introspection—or, as the chorus puts it, coming closer to realizing “all the things you know you could be.”
“Isolate Myself,” another product of the Joshua Tree sessions, pairs strummed acoustic guitar with visceral lyrics about a relationship on the brink. “It encapsulates those moments when you feel really helpless because life’s coming at you from every angle, and you have to isolate to even yourself out,” she says. “When you’re feeling that way, you can run to the bathroom and cry it out.”
Other tracks, like “Cancel Your Plans,” a collaboration with the LA-based production duo 9AM, take the opposite tack, pleading for after-hours intimacy unfolding over a gently percolating groove. “I brought them outside of their box, and they brought me outside of my box with the way they recorded my vocals,” Mallory says of 9AM. “It was such a fun experience.”
On Thorns, Mallory Merk bolsters her already-impressive discography with impeccably crafted songs that capture her unfiltered self. It deepens one of her clearest goals since she first started writing songs—to be honest and vulnerable. “Thorns is my story,” she says. “And telling your story, sharing your truth—that’s the most important thing you can do as an artist.”