Alice on the roof is a 21-year-old Belgian artist who shot to fame with her Easy Come Easy Go EP and its infectious melancholic sensuality. Now, after releasing an EP of her ethereal pop this past spring, Alice is preparing to release her first full length album, Higher, in March 2016.
Her father is an instrument-inventing electrical engineer and her mother an architect, Alice entered an academy of music at age six. “I learned to sing in harmony and absorb family influences – from Peter Gabriel to Jewish and Chinese music. I studied piano and especially vocals. I’ve always been much better at expressiveness than technique.”
Alice is a naturally anglophile singer without borders, even if her English-speaking tastes (Bon Iver, Beirut) also run to a selection of Nordic talents. “I’m a great fan of Björk, Sigur Rós and that Danish singer, Oh Land. They taught me to develop more warmth in my voice.” Another frontier crossed.
Higher will include a number of tracks that were on Easy Come Easy Go EP, along with nine new songs. They all breathe a poetry in which the bitterness of adolescence emerges softly through the adult paradigms. Alice explains those sensations. “Throughout the year I spent in the United States, I was feeling quite sensitive. I had a long- distance Belgian romantic relationship (…) that shaped my lyrical writing and musical development. I’d also decided to learn to be independent by living far from my family, which is what “Race In The Shadows” is about. That lesson has helped me now, I’m doing the most frightening thing in my life: singing (she smiles).”
From the suspended ballad “Let me Down” to the almost funky groove of “Sound Of Drums,” the album forges inevitable bonds with melancholy and other tactile sensations, often in an enchanting game of hide and go seek. “I sing in English because it’s easier for me to say things in that language than in French, my native tongue. The poetry I try to put into my songs avoids being too direct, leaving a certain leeway for interpretation. The musicality of words leads to emotion…”
