Astrel K - The Foreign Department (2024)

The Foreign Department is the second album by Astrel K, the solo project of Stockholm-based British ex-pat, Rhys Edwards. Those already familiar with Edwards’ work will likely know him for fronting the cultishly great Ulrika Spacek, and given he operates as the principal songwriter in both projects, much of the same hallmarks of his cathartic, elliptical songwriting are present in Astrel K. Nonetheless, The Foreign Department feels like a rubicon moment of sorts, and the album that Edwards has unconsciously been working towards his entire creative life. As a title, The Foreign Department frames a life-in-transition/artist-in-exile document that maps two impromptu moves in twelve months for its songwriter: the first from London in pursuit of a relationship, the second between homes in Stockholm as that decade long relationship then suddenly dissolved. Indeed, diffusion, dissolution and reconstitution feel like appropriate touchstones for its recurring themes. Written amidst the flux of two states, the resulting eleven tracks came to represent a precognitive search for shifting identity and with it forming an unwittingly biographical record. With a former life stripped away, there emerged an opportunity to reinvent a sense of self through art, now not just as a writer, but a composer also. Developing the confidence to arrange songs in ways he'd previously considered off-limits, while also taking cues from the opulent string and brass arrangements of records like Mercury Rev's Deserters' Songs and Death of A Ladies Man by Leonard Cohen, Edwards enlisted a range of performers to bring to life the mini-symphonies forming in his head. For all its troubled origins, The Foreign Department is a remarkably warm sounding collection. Edwards' lyrics are knotty and neurotic, dancing around the poetry of quarter-life anxiety, but the music itself is often joyous and uplifting, the combination expressing that neat duality of melancholic euphoria.