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DanFromUpstairs ft: BrokenPen - The Ugly Succubus (Official Video)

Multi-faceted Brighton based producer and musician DanFromUpstairs returns with a brand new release with the arrival of ‘The Ugly Succubus’ featuring Angolan African rapper BrokenPen (4th October), lifted from the upcoming genre-melding debut album ‘Hopeless Fables’ due later this year.

Following on from recent singles, 'Love' and 'Cupid's Error', Dan says: "''The Ugly Succubus' explores the tenuous relationship that we as humans have with temptation, and the constant battle between being true to yourself, and being led astray by dark influences. This subject matter is all performed in rap form by the featured artist, BrokenPen over a beat which at first is upbeat and explosive but then morphs fluidly into some more mysterious and transcendental passages."

There's a clear likeness to some pop-rock, hiphop or emo hits from the past couple of decades, but with a digital attention to detail that you'd find in more left-field electronic acts.

Genre-bending is a term that gets thrown around a fair bit these days, and while it's true that sonic barriers seem to be collapsing more and more in contemporary music, DanFromUpstairs' debut alum, 'Hopeless Fables' is a stand out example that fully embodies this ethos.

This album comes from the mind of a Brighton-based music fanatic, captivated by using genre as a tool for creative self-expression. The result is an exciting project covering a wide palette of sounds. The album flows through shades of electronica, funk, hip-hop, jungle, rock, before landing on a dark, theatrical folk finale; but all woven together through Dan's idiosyncratic production, seamless song transitions and otherworldly conceptual fabric, rendering the experience one continuous fever dream.

A number of years ago, Dan decided to tick off a bucket list item and began creating an album. At the time, he wasn't quite aware of how long this would take, as the vision for the album kept expanding, various featured vocalists and instrumentalists had to be procured to fit in with said vision, and his music production skills improved continually, causing him to go back over and refine the tracks multiple times. During this process, a pleasant and unexpected surprise emerged and Dan realised that this would in fact become a concept album. As this became more apparent, various themes materialised, the song titles named themselves, and it became clear how it would all fit together.

The finished product asks us; what if the spirits that controlled our fate were just as hopeless as we are? Some people believe that there's poetry to the universe, that there's a divine plan in place, that an event such as two people falling in love could be the work of a celestial inevitability, that death comes when the time is right. But what if death was flawed and clumsy? What if love could misfire? Would we still try to find order amidst the chaos?

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