The Sea The Sea announces the upcoming release of their sophomore album, From the Light. Produced by Troy Pohl, From the Light is set for release on June 1, 2018. Comprised of Chuck and Mira Costa, The Sea The Sea has been revered by publications ranging from Buzzfeed and the TED organization to Pitchfork and NPR, who compared the duo to the likes of The Milk Carton Kids and The Weepies. In response to their first album, Huffington Post referred to them as,“two of the loveliest male-female voices you might ever hear this or any other year.” Based in Troy, New York, they are currently touring the East Coast as a four-piece band.
For Chuck and Mira Costa, The Sea The Sea was born out of the need for something new. “We met a few years back and had fallen out of touch. She was working a regular day job after graduating college, I was on the brink of quitting music because it just wasn’t fun anymore,” Chuck says. In the fall of 2011, the two reconnected, Mira quickly quit her job, and the duo began exploring different sounds. In 2014, they released their debut album Love We Are We Love, produced by bassist Todd Sickafoose (Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird). “It was a closer look at a leap of faith into the unknown and what those moments leading up to that mean, the free fall after. We wanted the lyrics to be the center of everything, with an acoustic guitar,” Mira explains, emphasizing the album’s musical simplicity and lyrical complexities.
Love We Are We Love was well-received and praised by NPR, American Songwriter, and No Depression, gathering over 15 million streams on Spotify. They were featured on NPR’s Heavy Rotation and have graced Mountain Stage multiple times, with host Larry Groce saying, “They’re ready to take their place among the best young male/female duos currently performing.” The video for their song “Waiting”, an animation of 3,454 (oil on paper) paintings, sparked viral interest including Buzzfeed, Pitchfork, and inclusion at the 2015 international TED conference. In 2016, they released In The Altogether, which earned a spot on Apple Music’s ‘Best of the Week’ and ‘A-List Singer/Songwriter’ lists. The six-song EP was produced by Troy Pohl and featured by outlets like Huffington Post and the Bluegrass Situation.
The Sea The Sea teamed up with Troy Pohl again for their third record and second full-length, From The Light. Musically, the duo decided to build and expand on the sounds of Love We Are We Love, touring as a four-piece with Cara May Gorman (vocals, synthesizer) and drummer and percussionist Stephen Struss; lyrically, they aimed to explore the symbolism behind light. “We were really looking at light and the idea of its duality -- there’s a binary division between everything, it’s all connected,” Mira says, adding that the lyrics of the title track bring the album together as a whole, “There’s a crack where the window's open, it's the width of the page you turned. It’s a blink of an eye from the light to the dark to the light to the dark again.”
From The Light begins with the single “Everybody”, a prologue and commentary on the current political climate, an underlying theme of the album. “Written during the fall and winter of 2016, we felt the differences in people around us a lot more than usual. This is our way of trying to see through those differences without judgment. We wanted to relate that people can co-exist and find common ground, even if opinions differ,” Chuck explains. Similar themes can be heard in “Ricochet”, a message about formulating your own views, independent of what others may think. Others, like “Phototropic” and “Good For Something” focus around hope and positivity.
“‘Things can never be so bad that they’re not good for something’ is a phrase my grandfather used to say. The idea is that throughout the ups and downs, there is a positive that can be taken from all of it.” From The Light is an all-inclusive soundtrack that parallels the duality seen in everyday life; but more importantly, the album recognizes the balance that only exists with difference.
