Loney Dear – Swedish singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emil Svanängen – has released today a new single, ‘Oppenheimer’. The track is from his forthcoming album ‘A Lantern and a Bell’, due to be released on March 26, 2021 through Peter Gabriel’s Real World label.
The track is a beautiful rumination on American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was involved in the development of the atomic bomb. The music and lyrics pour with feeling, with captivating lines such as “High is the tide/That wash out the memories/Low lie the stars/Now is the time/To wash off your burdens/From now there’s no right from wrong”.
As Loney Dear explains about his inspiration for writing the song: “A lot of those people working with the atomic bomb were astrophysicists and they were passionate about researching space and mathematics and here they had this amazing opportunity, almost too good to miss. Maybe they were also trapped in a situation that was hard to avoid in a way. And immediately they understood, when they saw the results, that this is horrible. Like we’ve been tricked into doing this. There’s the famous quote by Oppenheimer; ‘I have become the destroyer of worlds.’ There’s just something really powerful about it and that era. It’s crazy, the fact that during that nuclear age, the atomic bomb was the future and it was popular culture. And the fact that the bikini was the latest fashion product and they named it after where they detonated an atomic bomb just tells you so much – it was a different age”.
‘Oppenheimer’ is out now via Real World.
