Gloria de Oliveira announces ‘The Lying Swans,’ out October 30 via La Double Vie, and shares Randall Dunn-produced single ‘Fading Faces’
Gloria de Oliveira makes records that sound like they were transmitted from a film that does not exist, and her new one has a mythological source text to match. The German-Brazilian musician and visual artist announced The Lying Swans on Thursday (July 23), out October 30 via La Double Vie, and shared the lead single “Fading Faces.” Recorded across Iceland, New York, and Berlin with producer Randall Dunn, the nine-song cycle draws on Giallo film scores, bossa nova, left-field electronics, and the Greek myth of Leda, the mortal woman Zeus seduced in the form of a swan.
The producer credit is the tell. Dunn built his reputation on the heavier end of the American underground, engineering and producing for Sunn O))), Earth, and Boris before crossing into gauzier territory with Anna von Hausswolff and Zola Jesus. He is a specialist in making enormous sounds feel intimate and small sounds feel vast, which is precisely the register de Oliveira works in. Her last album, 2022’s Oceans of Time, was a collaboration with Dean Hurley, David Lynch’s longtime sound designer, and it established her as an artist working somewhere between song and atmosphere. Trading one architect of American dream logic for another is a coherent next step.
A Song That Made the Album Possible
“Fading Faces” was written first and recorded first, and de Oliveira has framed it as the door that opened everything else. “This is not only the first single, but also the very first piece of music I wrote when I started working on the album,” she said in a statement. “It was also the first song that Randall Dunn and I later recorded together in Iceland. In many ways, it’s the reason the album even exists.
She points to the emotional cost of it directly: the track “required me to allow myself this degree of vulnerability that permeates ‘The Lying Swans.”
The song itself is ethereal and unhurried, built around the line “I numb my hurt one last time,” and she describes it as following the tradition of her previous albums while simultaneously drawing on new modes of expression. The Iceland sessions are audible in the space around the arrangement, all cold air and long decay.
Leda, Giallo, and the Logic of Dreams
The reference points assembled here are unusual enough to be worth taking seriously. Giallo, the Italian horror-thriller genre of the 1960s and 70s, produced some of the strangest film music ever committed to tape, with Goblin and Ennio Morricone building scores from prog, lounge, and dissonance in equal measure. Bossa nova sits at the opposite pole, all warmth and restraint. De Oliveira’s project has always lived in the tension between beauty and unease, and the tracklist reads like a storyboard: “Leda,” “Fading Faces,” “Sacred Hearts,” “The Voyager,” “Wounded Birds,” “The Wind Took it Away,” “The Perfect Con,” “Shadows in the Fog,” and “Cranes in Flight.”
The Leda myth gives the record its title and its central image. It is a story about transformation, deception, and a woman at the mercy of a shape-shifting god, which makes “The Lying Swans” less a decorative literary reference than a thesis. Birds recur across the sequence, wounded and in flight, and the whole thing is billed as an oneiric cycle rather than a collection of songs.
That framing is what separates de Oliveira from the crowded field of atmospheric dream pop. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose visual work informs the music, and her records function as constructed worlds rather than mood boards. On the evidence of “Fading Faces,” The Lying Swans will be her most exposed one yet.
