It is as if I have found myself again.

As I have unfolded the realms of Ghostly Kisses’ fourth album, Across the Pond, I find myself retracing years of lost time in my life. Over the past two weeks, my head has been in the clouds as I immerse myself in the world Margaux Sauvé and Louis-Étienne Santais have created during my late-night walks through the wondrous cobblestone streets of Old Montreal. Ghostly Kisses’ new album is the ideal soundtrack for the darkened streets and luminous hidden alleys in this majestic city.

Across the Pond - Ghostly Kisses — Across the Pond – Ghostly Kisses

Margaux Sauvé’s voice transports one to the realms and intimacies of a lost and simpler time, when human connection was of utmost significance. This feeling is even more poignantly expressed through the duo’s visual imagery and overall aesthetic, particularly in the way they evoke the past. Their music encapsulates the fragility of what it means to be human as they recapture centuries past.

Since album release day, I have found it very hard to step away from the opening track “Fade from Me,” as the aching sense of memory that is created in this singular track is so very heartbreaking. A singular song like this only appears once every few decades, and I am reminded of songs that changed our world by the likes of Portishead, Cocteau Twins, and This Mortal Coil. Our world has been so very diminished without the creativity of these artists. I only feel like I am able to breathe again with the majesty of such a song. It enables us to retreat within the memories of our own minds as we attempt to recapture the illusion of lost time.

As Margaux Sauvé sings in “Fade from Me”:

“Can we go back?
I wanna go back in time
I wish I could draw you from my mind
Still holding on to every line”

On Across the Pond, Margaux Sauvé and Louis-Étienne Santais establish a deep, luminescent existential reflection on what it means to be human, dreaming through their music of an otherworldly way of being in this life.

It is a world that I have always deeply inhabited. Their music feels like my second skin, providing me with a form of shelter as I continue to live otherwise than the norm.

There are deep currents of darkened meditation in this album, but they are also buoyed by remarkable shards of positive luminescence. There is always a weighted tension between intensive self-reflection and how one can experience oneself otherwise in the world, especially amid the remarkable impact of chance encounters.

In my own life, I could never have imagined the extraordinary feelings I would experience through meeting Gisel that day, or how she would reveal, without really knowing it, a very different world to me. She seems to embody a lost time and world in which I desired to be intensely immersed, drawn to her interiority and ethereal beauty. She appeared to me as the most transcendent dream — a remarkable woman dressed in black and immersed in the world of Depeche Mode. In a manner of speaking, she almost appears from a more crystalline world, and, through a twist of fate, we wound up in each other’s lives.

This sentiment is deeply evoked in their song “Ordinary, Extraordinary,” as Sauvé sings:

“What if I’d already known
There’s more to life than I thought?
Something I wouldn’t have known
If I didn’t meet you at all”

If I hadn’t met Gisel, I would never have understood how the ordinary can become extraordinary. In every moment, I wonder where life will take us when an unexpected person can radically change how one reflects on what it means to be alive, revealing an uncanny transformation of self through a profound connection and an unformed, perhaps forever unknown love.

As I listen to this album by Ghostly Kisses, I reflect on the remarkable avenues of escape and illumination that were created by their predecessors,

avenues through which my friends and I were able to live grander and more free lives. Artists such as Portishead, Cocteau Twins, and This Mortal Coil offered us a different language of expression through their lyricism. The sounds they created enabled us to inhabit the world in more resplendent ways, breaking down barriers around how music could be understood and enjoyed.

Ghostly Kisses evoke a very different feeling and verve on Across the Pond, one that feels urgently necessary for our radically altered times. In this time, we are in need of intense self-reflection to move beyond the lack of depth in music today. Ghostly Kisses provide us with exactly that on this beautiful album that graces our souls.

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