Douglas Dare shares new single “One Eye Open”👁

Following the recent release of his boldly brilliant fourth album, Omni, in May via Erased Tapes, British artist Douglas Dare has released his new single One Eye Open.

Fully embracing the all-encompassing club sound that has become such a key part of his new live show, One Eye Open serves as a taster ahead of his forthcoming UK & Europe headline tour which includes a Brighton date baby!

Douglas will be at Dust on the 1st October (check out other dates and venues at the end of this article).

Douglas said “Originally One Eye Open was written for The Birdsong Project and was an acoustic guitar-led song,” and “When I was writing my new electronic album Omni, Robert at my label said he was curious to hear OEO in a similar vein. I leaned fully into a heavy club sound and I was surprised to hear it worked in this new way. One Eye Open was so heavy that it didn’t make sense to include on the Omni album so we saved it for its own moment.”

Since 2013, Douglas has blurred classical, chamber-pop, folk and avant-garde to dazzling effect, with a startling voice that can stop you in your tracks. It’s why he’s played with luminaries like Nils Frahm, Perfume Genius and Ólafur Arnalds, and was selected by David Lynch and The Cure’s Robert Smith for their respective cultural festivals in Manchester (MIF) and London (Meltdown).

But Douglas’s fourth album, Omni, is a fresh awakening. Encouraged by Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths, he decided to step away from acoustic instruments, especially the piano he grew up playing, and swapped them for synths and drum machines.

Seen by Douglas himself as a bold rebirth and embrace of the electronic, Omni is all at once a throbbing, avant-garde, queer, dark and cinematic record imbued with a love of rave culture and sense of fearless storytelling that’s deeply evocative.

His new music has much in common with Arca and the late SOPHIE, two artists for whom self-expression meant liberation. “I got to hang out in the studio with her,” says Douglas of the latter musician, “the way she made music made a big impression on me.” And yet Omni is steeped in the kind of deft storytelling, sweeping strings, elegant contrasts and fairytale atmosphere that marks Douglas out as a crucial and singular voice. It’s not often you hear a strutting electro banger that could have been straight out of 90s Soho, with vocal loops inspired by US experimentalist Meredith Monk.

If there was an innocence to his last album, 2020’s acclaimed Milkteeth, with Douglas revisiting his childhood, then Omni sounds like an unburdening – even an unbuttoning. The album’s heady trance and obsidian industrial undercurrents were inspired by the throbbing dance floors Douglas has frequented over the years, from Adonis in London to Berghain in Berlin. “Those clubs are a really important part of becoming who I am now,” he says. “I’ve always gravitated towards rave music. That’s a part of me that most people don’t know yet.

Another part is his drag persona. He has always tended to keep it separate from his music, but his performances as ‘Visa’ are a key aspect of who Douglas is as an artist. Drag, he says, “reveals a little bit more of who you are”, as one tries on different looks and songs for size. With Omni, he says, it’s the same idea. He inhabits different characters across the songs, hence the title meaning ‘everyone and everything’. “I guess I’ve used other people to understand myself,” says Douglas of Omni’s central theme. “It’s like I’m trying to find myself in the universe.”

For Douglas, Omni is about reconciling all those different sides of himself – the songwriter, the raver, the lover, the observer. It’s a hugely queer record: seductive, sexy, lusty, untethered from the genre binary. “It’s even got sailors on it!” laughs Douglas. “You don’t get more queer than that.”

European & UK headline live dates:

Sep 24 – Copenhagen, DK at VEGA

Sep 26 – Hamburg, DE at Nachtasyl

Sep 27 – Berlin, DE at Kantine Am Berghain

Sep 29 – Paris, FR at Supersonic Records

Oct 1 – Brighton, UK at Dust

Oct 3 – Manchester, UK at YES, Pink Room

Oct 4 – Bristol, UK at The Lantern

Oct 8 – Glasgow, UK at The Rum Shack

Oct 9 – Liverpool, UK at Arts Club, The Loft

Oct 12 – Rennes, FR at Festival Rituel

Oct 16 – Amsterdam, NL at Cinetol