Pop band Antònia Font confirms a new album for 2012

Barcelona (ACN).- Catalan-singing band Antònia Font is preparing a new album. According to band sources, the group has all the material ready and is aiming to record it before the end of 2012. In an interview with the website Cugat.cat, singer Pau Debon explained that the album will be very different “aesthetically”. Antònia Font is continuing to tour with their last album, Lamparetes, but they are currently combining stage-shows with the task of creating another outstanding album. As usual, the songwriter and guitarist of the group, Joan Miquel Oliver, will play a prominent role in the new work, bringing his unique and surrealist vision of the world through the songs from the new album.

Antònia Font is a Catalan-singing pop band from Majorca (Balearic Islands) formed in 1997 by Pau Debon (vocals), Joan Miquel Oliver (guitar), Joan Roca (bass), Pere Debon (drums) and Jaume Manresa (keyboards). They are one of the main bands on the Catalan pop scene, along with others such as Manel, Mishima or Els Amics de les Arts. The group is led by composer Joan Miquel Oliver, who focused the band’s direction by limiting the lyrics not only by subject matter but also by dialect, choosing to write in the native dialect of Catalan specific to Majorca, where the band has its roots.

Constant game

Their music is basically festive and their lyrics are funny, humorous, inventive and realistic. The group’s creative universe is focused on space, astronomy and everything related to astronauts, combined with themes from everyday reality. So, they establish a constant game between local, universal and cosmic perspectives of the world we live in.

The band name was chosen after a fellow female student on campus which the band members found as intriguing for an all-male band. The group have a friend named Antònia Font and liked the idea of giving a band composed of five men a woman's name. In 1997 they started working on their first demo and played their first concert in Bunyola (Majorca). The demo and concert led to their self-titled debut in 1999, Antònia Font, a festive folk album with great lyrics.

Stylistic continuity

Two years later, they presented their second record, A Rússia. According to Pau Debon, the band opted for stylistic continuity with their first album because “the style they have adopted had worked well and they were pleased with it”. The album received the 2001 Catalan album of the year prize awarded by Spanish radio station Ràdio 4.

Evolution and silence

A Rússia was followed in 2002 by their third album, Alegria. The sound of the group seems to get more cultivated with each record. This becomes even more obvious when the band starts to incorporate audiovisual presentations to their stage-show and musical output. On Taxi, the fourth album, the LP comes with a DVD and a textbook attached. The central theme is an invented outer space world. Space doesn’t return on Batiscafo Katiuscas (2005) which seems to be an inner journey in which loneliness and melancholy are more present.

Antònia Font is a band which in the past few years has been instrumental in the generational renewal of pop in Catalan. In 2007, the band were acclaimed for their album Coser i cantar (literally “Sewing and Singing” an equivalent to the English expression “Plain sailing”) and band-leader Joan Miquel Oliver then went on to pursue a solo career.

In 2011, after four years of silence, the group came back with a new album entitled Lamparetes, in which they’ve recovered their signs of identity: a slightly eccentric vein of pop with highly imaginative lyrics based on fantastical stories and adventures from past eras. On the last album, Antònia Font paid homage to the figure of the pioneer and charismatic leaders, with references to Clint Eastwood and Abraham Lincoln.