Samodiva Presents - Scarlet - Mixtape 5 - June 4

Scarlet announce debut album “Pontika” with a concert at Mixtape 5 B-Side on June 4

Behind the band from Burgas is “Samodiva” - an independent music community with a mission to support the development of young talents

Bulgarian indie rock/post-punk band Scarlet is set to release their debut album “Pontika” on June 4 with the help of “Samodiva” - an independent music community with a mission to support the development of young talents, founded by composer and producer Georgi Linev. The first studio album of the band from Burgas also includes “Sunflower” - the song with which they won the second edition of the “Youth New Song Contest”.

After the release of the first single “Pumpal” on May 1, the band is preparing another new track, which will be presented at the end of May before the official premiere of the album. Scarlet will celebrate the release of “Pontika” with a special concert at Mixtape 5 B-Side on June 4 with the participation of their friends from Tlen.

“Working on the album was an extremely difficult process. If I have to be honest, I would compare it to climbing a mountain peak - even though we can see it from the foothills, the road up is long and full of difficulties. Fortunately, once again we met the support of the musical collective “Samodiva”. Thanks to the people from the team, a lot of the weight of the laborious parts of the whole undertaking for us was lifted from our shoulders - such as the documentation for the National Culture Fund, the actual recording process, connecting with the right people for us and also promoting the album. Regarding the recordings themselves - this turned out to be an extremely inspiring and interesting process. The support of “Samodiva” also led to our work with Georgi Linev, who took on the role of producer. In our work, he not only did the typical things for this position, but also helped us connect the ideas and the final result, which we were all fascinated by”, shares frontman Anton.

Behind the music of Scarlet are Georgi Linev - producer, recording engineer, percussion, synthesizer; Georgi Stanev - assistant producer, recording engineer, mix, mastering; Nikola Nikolov - vocal direction.

Georgi Stanchev is a musician, producer and mix/mastering engineer with over 20 years of active activity on the Bulgarian scene. In addition to being a long-time producer and sound engineer of the cult Bulgarian rock band “Ostava”, he is also known as the founder and guitarist of Lavasonic. Over the years, he has also participated in the production of numerous albums and singles in our country, including with groups such as Jeremy?, Hayes & Y and many other young alternative bands.

Nikola Nikolov is known as the founder and vocalist of one of the most famous alternative rock bands in our country - TDK. Together with Mario Popov (guitar) and Veselin Petrov (bass guitar), they founded the rock band in 2012 in Plovdiv. Their debut album “Lyuspi” was released in 2017, followed two years later by a second studio album - “Uspeh”. In 2023, their third project “Nemesta” was released. In addition to being a frontman and musician in the band, over the years he has been an organizer of events and festivals (Wrong Fest), as well as a curator of the new music program at “Toplotsentrala”.

PUMPAL

The song “Pumpal” is the penultimate in the chronology of writing the album. We wrote it together, as is the case with most of our songs. The whole idea of ​​the lyrics is that every person has some kind of fictional reality in their head, but it is influenced by what happens to you in real life. It was born after I started delving into some self-consoling and self-deceiving thoughts. I was falling into a kind of limbo, a vicious circle. These thoughts are very destructive and I'm glad that I was able to look at everything from a more objective point of view. The whole thing is absurd - I live in a world that totally doesn't correspond to the things that are happening in the world around me. After I presented the lyrics to the rest of the band, sometimes before I had to explain what I meant, but this time they understood me without words - they didn't ask me, as if they were in the same place, inside my head. Everything with the name of the song started from a funny story - in Burgas this is a word they use to call people who are jerks and jokers. The song was actually named that way after we were sitting and rehearsing, and bassist Dimi was recording what was happening in the room with his dictaphone. He always manages to come up with super interesting names for the songs. At first we hadn't assessed how original this name was, but if we're looking for the standard one - we're just wasting our time. The song will be released in early May with a video clip promoted with a very important concert for us. We hope that it will mark the beginning of a new chapter, with which we can capture the songs we have played so far. It was very difficult for us to capture the exact "frame" of each song during the recordings.

The debut album of the band Scarlet - "Pontika" was realized with the financial support of the National Fund "Culture".