Pytko - The Way We Blush (2022)

The Way We Blush’ is the debut album from PYTKO, a Polish-born, London-based artist and a recent signing to Phantasy Sound. Following two singles remixed by DJ Python and Bullion respectively, ‘The Way We Blush’ is an intoxicating trip down the rabbit hole of PYTKO’s vision of outsider music; resplendent and emotive, blending classic dream pop with experimental, electronic production.

‘The Way We Blush’ was largely written as PYTKO attempted to settle in the UK, having originally moved from Warsaw to London, shortly after the Brexit vote of 2016. Reflecting the complexity and harsh reality of settling into a new, uncertain environment, each of the nine tracks on the album play like sonic short films, each telling a story that encourages listeners to lean in closer. Sometimes providing escape and sometimes catharsis, ‘The Way We Blush’ proves to be a vivid sensory experience, illustrated with accompanying images from close friend and artist Yvette Wong, a Central Saint-Martins graduate whose work focuses on “childhood, memories and steadfast feminism.”

Having written music since childhood, PYTKO’s instinctive process is to “treat sound like material”. It’s an approach immediately apparent on album opener ‘Golden Scales’, in which strangled guitars are detuned and lost in vivid electronic feedback. Recent single ‘Flowers’ echoes goth and post-punk, hints of This Mortal Coil wrapped in production inspired by personal hero and studio pioneer, Alva Noto.

‘Planet’ projects the tangled emotions of the artist on a cosmic canvas, creating a churning, windswept soundscape from impressively DIY methods. On debut single ‘Save My Day’, PYTKO presents an aching internal monologue reimagined as a haunting melody, while the fruit of ‘Orchids and Limes’ conjures an even darker sense of romance with an ambitious cyber-balearic edge, a mood then scrambled amid the glitchy electro of ‘Silent’.

As ‘The Way We Blush’ unravels, PYTKO’s writing allows for slithers of earnest vulnerability. The sly ‘Your Wife’ skirts with both servitude and an ironic rebuttal of patriarchal expectations, while ‘Tango’ unravels into elegant darkness. In conclusion, the nautical fantasia of ‘Sea Salt’ appears to reverse a tide in order to glimpse hope in the promise of the ocean, far from the pressures of the city…

PYTKO - ‘The Way We Blush’ is available digitally across all platforms on October 28th.