BEAR WORSHIP

Bear Worship is a celebration. It's about positivity and realism, love and friends, passion and nostalgia, and the need for creativity. After a string of well regarded singles which have received airplay on RTE and the BBC, featured in myriad blogs, and ended up in a number of end-of-year lists, Bear Worship’s debut album WAS was released on the 15th June 2017.

The backbone of WAS’s sound is drums and bass guitar, and layered above are swathes of synthesizer, guitar, arpeggios, and harmonies, all topped off with Bear Worship’s distinctive vocals. Sonically it lies somewhere between Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective, with other touchstones being Deerhunter, St Vincent, Oh No Ono, Giorgio Moroder, Air, Tame Impala, and the Beach Boys. The songs were written and recorded between Bear Worship's home studio and Stephen Shannon's Experimental Audio (Adrian Crowley, Barry McCormack, the Late David Turpin, Strands).

In their exclusive album premiere, The Thin Air —who consider Bear Worship as “one of the country’s very best musical talents right now”— describe WAS as a “prismatic traipse of melodically rich, compositionally ambitious alt-pop”. A statement of intent from an artist who believes that, in music, imagination and exploration are paramount.

“While I vaguely resent a track burying itself into my brain for over 48 hours, it’s testament to just how glorious a piece of music this is. And that’s before you get to the utterly sublime production, in which the attention to detail takes the track up another level still." – BBC Across The Line (Shimmerings, Track for the Day)

9/10 - “Ultimately, this is probably the most musically experimental and adventurous Irish album you’re likely to hear this year” (Hot Press Magazine).

Album of the Week - “Karl Knuttel’s debut album under the moniker of Bear Worship has a hypnagogic quality to it, last heard so prominently in music when Animal Collective were at their Merriweather Post-Pavilion height.” (The Irish Times).