Today Alternative-R&B artist EJ Marais has announced the release of his debut LP CUTS, out August 21st Via La Castanya. With the album announcement comes the re-release of double singles from the LP, "Better" and "Love.MP3 (featured On Rosalia's Spotify Playlist)." 

On the process of creating the record Marais explains, "The album came out of a series of sessions I started in early 2018 together with Ekhi Lopetegi, at the time we weren't planning to record an album, but an EP. Since then, the album has met many stages and has been the result of perseverance, I think of it as a mix of many stages and resources. It wasn't recorded in the same place, or mixed and engineered by one person, some musicians have played small parts on it, hence the chaotic credits. 

The general idea was to make a contemporary album that included elements from RnB, pop, or Urban while maintaining a melancholic, singer-songwriter essence. I felt a necessity to bring real instruments into these songs because I was seeking a human, personal touch. When I put the album together I thought that it would be too eclectic but then I thought of it as a collage between digital samples and real instruments and felt comfortable with that. It was also a process of learning and experimentation, I really liked the possibilities of digital manipulation, discovering autotune and all that...

I have always thought that the result of an artist has to reflect the times that we are living. We live in crazy times with constant interruptions, over information and surrounded by the language of advertising and I wanted to make a response to that, to offer a space where people can get lost in. Barcelona as a city has also played a huge role on the album, I was influenced by the freshness of the Urban scene here, especially when it came to mixing genres and taking unorthodox production decisions."

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