The 45-track debut will let your emotions pour out uncontrollably, for quite a while
He’s deep, passionate and a bit of a rule-breaker when it comes to music industry norms. On Oct. 20, the album Voyce* has been waiting to release will finally debut.
Voyce* is a Montreal-based alternative R&B musician. While he prefers not to define himself by a single genre of music, one thing is for sure—he is a storyteller when it comes to songwriting, and his raw emotions are never out of the picture.
Alone in a Crowd: Angels | Demons is his official debut album that will be released independently. It will be a surprise to any music junkie to find that the album contains a whoping 45 tracks. Wait, did you just read 45?
Wait, 45 songs released on the same day? Fourty-five different songs?
Indeed. He also produced, recorded and wrote the entire album on his own.
While most musicians today release six-song EPs, or 12-song LPs, usually with the pressure of a label giving them a distinct musical path to follow, Voyce* refuses to comply with such standards. The choice to have so many tracks was purely his own.
“I wanted the project to be entirely produced by me because I wanted to embody that listeners are really in my mind, and not in my mind through the point of view of someone else,” he said.
The album is meant to reflect a journey through his life since 2010, which is when he began writing the record.
“I didn’t want to make an album that was going to be an easy thing to listen to in one shot,” he said. “I want people to treat it the way they would treat a novel or book they’re reading, where every night you read five chapters and the next day you can’t wait to read what’s going to happen next. That’s the way I wanted this album to be listened to.”
Over the past five years, Voyce* has faced many hardships, including the passing of his mother in 2010, which is what drove him to pursue music as a career. Since that moment, he has never looked back.
“When my mom passed, I decided that instead of waiting for time to slip by, I should just take my dream and just run with it,” he said.
Pain is one of Voyce*’s biggest motivations when writing music, and his emotions are always at the core of it, he said. Whether it’s a heartbreak, an encounter with an ex-lover or as he said, “the madness that is my mind,” he draws on all aspects of pain and captures them in song, whether lyrically or through his moody melody of trance-like beats.
“I’m not the type of person to sit down and say ‘I’m going to make a hit song right now.’ I kind of just let songwriting happen because it needs to happen,” he said.
The 45-track album is not the only musically unorthodox choice Voyce* is making for this project. He has also decided not to have an official single to promote the album before the release date, like most artists would have.
“I didn’t want to go the route of having the typical first single because it’s hard to have that first song that says, ‘This is it, this is what you’re going to get.’ [On this record] you’re just going to get something else then something else,” he said. With such a lengthy album that has no genre limitations, it’s no wonder there isn’t one song to really represent it as a whole.
The name Alone in a Crowd represents the idea of being unique, different, and not necessarily fitting into societal norms, Voyce* said. Angels | Demons as a subtitle came from the way he sees himself, neither good nor evil, but a little bit of both. Throughout the album, the songs are told in the point of view of those two different extremes, he said. He plans to have all of his future albums titled Alone in a Crowd, with a different subtitle every time, “sort of like the Harry Potter series,” he said.
He played a sneak peek of one of the tracks, “Relapse,” which is based on a personal experience that he is still connected to today.
“It’s about a feeling I got when I saw a long-term ex-girlfriend of mine. It was a strange feeling because we hadn’t been together for such a long time,” he said. “But when I saw her, there was kind of that relapse moment where I thought, ‘my god, those feelings again.’ It was a bittersweet pain that stuck with me for a few days and I felt like that there was an unresolved history that I hadn’t really dived into. The song then came to me.”
The song begins with a few dreary piano chords and slowly slips into Voyce*’s haunting, echoey vocals. Backed with lower-register harmonies and a few falsetto riffs, it progresses into a trance-like beat. It’s one of those songs that you can repeat over and over again, not only because it’s catchy, but it also puts you in quite a relaxed mood.
Anyone would be curious as to how the entire album would work as a physical piece. Voyce* said physical copies may be in the works further down the line, but for now he is sticking with virtual copies. “I think the way music is changing, I want to take advantage of that,” he said.
If you’re looking to bring some raw, unguarded emotion into your life, Voyce* will take you on a journey. While we might all at some point feel alone in a crowd, music may allow us to not only understand the emotions of others, but to also see ourselves in the stories being told.
For news about upcoming shows, check out Voyce* at voycemusic.com. The album will be available on Spotify and iTunes as of Oct. 20.
