Album of the week – N° 7

In this weekly series, we’ll cover someone’s favorite Album of the Week. 

Exploring new music and discovering new bands is always fun. Without music we couldn’t even listen to all of our great gear. Music is what unites us and as such we are reviving a very old series, in which we each week talk about one specific album. In short: “The Album of the Week”!

Lieven started this album of the week series with a record he had been listening to for 32 years and this week’s edition of the AOTW is something completely different. The 7th album of the week is from the Belgian band  dEUS, and the album is “How to replace it“.

Belgian art rock band dEUS have traversed decades of weirdness and uncommonly angular alternative rock, with a sound that’s remained hard to pin down and harder to predict since they formed in the early ’90s. The lineup has changed over the years, but the band kept their music inventive and multi-dimensional on standout albums like 1999’s The Ideal Crash and 2012’s Following Sea. Eighth studio album How to Replace It arrived in February of 2023, the band’s first new music in years.

dEUS formed in Antwerp in 1991. They began their career as strictly a cover band, but soon began performing new material, honing an irreverent, free-form live show drawing on influences ranging from folk and punk to jazz and prog rock.

Their most popular song ever, probably is “Suds and Soda”, which has an iconic violin intro, followed by heavy guitars.

The latest album “How to Replace It” was released in February of 2023. Instead of the band’s usual meticulous writing and refining process, the songs for How to Replace It, grew quickly out of focused jam sessions. My favorite track of this album actually is the title song track. How to Replace It has a curious late ’80s feel to it which has softened the edges and unbent the quirks of Belgium’s foremost art rock ensemble. If you check the album scores from the usual critics you will notice the album and title song don’t get the highest marks. I personally feel the album is highly underrated by international press. Let us know in the comments if you like it or not!

And that’s it for the seventh entry. If you haven’t given the album or track a chance, try it, and you might enjoy it as much as I do. Let us know in the comments if you agree with our song selection or let us know what song from this album you prefer.

You can check out my favourite track of the album on YouTube here. (live version)

Full album on Tidal here. Youtube here.

We feel and hope that this new series can be a way to recommend new music to our fellow headphone enthusiasts and so we’ll be posting a new recommendation each week on Saturday. If you want to see your favorite album being featured here, head over to our contact page, or hit us up on Twitter or Instagram. (hashtag #albumoftheweek or #AOTW). If we like it then you will be featured in this series.

See you next week!