Photo Via Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival - cqaf.com
The Courettes
Danish/Brazilian duo The Courettes write catchy garage rock songs with classic pop influences; however, underneath the fun of the music, the husband-and-wife band also have been exploring some darker themes in their lyrics recently.
The group, Martin Thorsen and Flavia Couri, will visit Milwaukee for the first time on Friday, Sept. 26 at X-Ray Arcade. Their most recent album, The Soul … of the Fabulous Courettes, was released in late 2024 on the English record label Damaged Goods.
The top-shelf album features contributions from La La Brooks from the Crystals, who sings on “California,” a song written when the band toured California back in 2023; Brill Building songwriter Richard Gottehrer of The Strangeloves; and Darian Sahanaja, a keyboardist and session musician who is known for his work with Brian Wilson, the Zombies and Heart.
Do You Like American Music?
With that guest list, it’s not surprising to hear Thorsen say the album is more expansively influenced by American music than their previous efforts.
“We went to the U.S.A. and got a lot of inspiration,” he says. “We wanted this beautiful California sound, I call it, like The Byrds and Beach Boys, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, his iconic sound he did in the ‘60s. But we also wanted to explore the possibilities of more, not more produced, but a different sound that was very much inspired by Hitsville U.S.A.”
Indeed, touring took them to Detroit, where they made it to the Motown Museum, and Memphis, too, where they visited Sun Records, attended Al Green’s Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, and stopped by Graceland.
Couri says they tried to break away from the “girl group songwriting” the Courettes did on their previous albums. “It’s a little more broad with influences,” she says. “We also brought in psychedelia.”
Soul features instruments like E-bows, castanets and timpani that they haven’t used on recordings previously. They brought all these influences together in the recording studio they built in their home. “Martin even constructed an echo chamber, a real echo chamber, not a plug-in,” Couri says. “You just press a button and it’s an echo chamber—it’s not like that. We try to be more analog and organic in our recordings.”
Dancing and Moving On
Gottehrer mixed two album standouts, “Boom, Boom, Boom” and “Keep Dancing.” The latter song might certainly send you to the dancefloor but carries deeper meaning for Couri, who wrote it after her father’s death—a father she says abandoned her and her sister. Thorsen’s father also passed away during the pandemic.
“It’s still uplifting, but it really has very dark lyrical matter with the relation of my non-present father and his death of Covid,” she says. “So, that’s very hardcore, you know, very deep feelings and a big taboo in my head, and a big, big heartache, the biggest pain I had in my whole life.
“But I didn’t want a song that people will listen to and just get depressed. You know, that's just not the way I like my songwriting to be. So, we thought about, OK, people still can listen to it. People can think it’s just about dancing, but, if you just dig a little bit more, you can see that there’s very dark themes in the album. I like this contrast that some people maybe just listen, not so careful, and think it was just one more heartbreak story, and it’s not so.”
Couri also cites a song from their 2021 album, Back to Mono, called “Hop the Twig,” which might sound like it’s trying to start a new dance craze, but it’s actually British slang for death.
“You know, we wrote the album in a pandemic,” she says.
Bits & Pieces
The band plans to take some time after their US tour in September to do some “organized songwriting” and maybe so some recording after the first of the year.
“We’re working in bits and pieces, you know, which actually, I think it's super fun, because we like to have a flow,” Couri says. “We like to write songs about the things that happen in our lives. So, we like living to get inspiration. We didn’t know that our trips to USA would make us write a whole album? That was something that just happened.”
She says she and Thorsen have been laughing about an “AI Spotify band” that put out four albums in two weeks. That’s not them, she says. “I really believe that albums have to have some kind of love and dedication and the stories to tell. It has to mean something.”
The Courettes perform 7 pm. Friday, Sept. 26 at X-Ray Arcade, 5036 S. Packard Ave., Cudahy. Milwaukee’s Jinksie also performs.
