Exclusive – Wilma Vritra share new video for ‘Clean Me Clean’

New album Grotto sets for May 6 release

Transatlantic duo Wilma Vritra share the video for ‘Clean my Clean’ – taken from their forthcoming second album Grotto – today with Juno Daily.

“I feel as if it’s a continuation of the cave / grotto / troglodyte theme. Full immersion (under water in this case), weight / balance / sound / perspective is slower and easier to process. It was somehow always an underwater song.” says Wilma Archer from the duo.

“Clean Me Clean’ is a continuation/reflection of my love life/situation since the track ‘The Hill’ from our first album Burd. It’s me retrospectively analysing my decisions and choices from that time period after moving on,” adds Vritra.

Grotto is the work of two musicians separated by an ocean but undoubtedly operating on a shared wavelength. One is Will Archer, a Newcastle-born but London-based multi-instrumentalist and composer who today records as Wilma Archer, but who you might also know for his writing and production for artists like Celeste, Nilufer Yanya and Jessie Ware. The other is Hal Donell Williams Jr, aka Vritra – a Los Angeles-based rapper whose tales of graft and grind are often couched in spiritual or cosmic terms. “That’s where my thoughts go at times,” he explains. “Hope, self-belief, self-worth, self-understanding – they are all forms of light, and when they glow bright your mood adjusts accordingly. That mood can attract or repel – same as the stars, same as the planets and their moons.”

Grotto twins Hal’s cosmic visions with equally expansive music. Tracks like ‘One Under’ and ‘Every Evening’ bloom with strings, brass and woodwind, but there’s a spaciousness to the orchestration that brings to mind a figure like Jean-Claude Vannier, the French composer whose music for Serge Gainsbourg brought dramatic strokes, the sense of emotional light and shade.  “I wanted to give Hal as much room as he needed vocally, forgoing any kind of vocal hook – instead dedicating a larger portion of the song to instrumental storytelling,” explains Will.

In parallel to Grotto, Will was completing work on his debut solo album A Western Circular, a long-term project that saw the light of day on Domino imprint Weird World last March. Featuring guest spots from the late MF DOOM, Future Islands’ Samuel T Herring, .

Pre-order your copy of Grotto, out on May 6 via Bad Taste here