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[title]Side Project are a pop duo made up of Luka Vidović and Anja Papa, both of whom are the group's songwriters, vocalists and key musicians. Formed in Zagreb in 2012, 'pop music' doesn't really adequately describe the pair's unique sound.
'We've been labelled as graveyard pop, synth pop and dark pop,” says Anja, 'but it's hard for us to describe our own music. Both of us can switch from listening to K-pop to post punk to grunge to new wave in the span of 30 minutes. And it's only natural you can hear the influences of everything we listen to in our music. Our lyrics tend to be a little darker than your usual pop song.'
Side Project released their impressive debut album Things Which No One Else Should Know About in 2015, but 2017 saw an eruption of creativity from the group. They released two albums in that year; a soundtrack to that year's Croatian short science fiction film, The Last Well, and the second Side Project album proper, Lonely Boys (all of which can be heard on Side Project's Bandcamp page). Side Project's musicianship, adventurous songwriting and dual vocals, perhaps especially Vidović's soaring and at times Dave Gahan-esque style, sound more confident than ever on this sophomore release.
'Everyone always says that Luka sounds like Dave Gahan,' laughs Anja, 'and sometimes he does. Depeche Mode is a band we love a lot, but we're not really striving to be like them. We've been listening to a lot of electronic music like Zhu, Wednesday Campanella, Bicep and Moderat recently too, as well as loads of retrowave. All of that can be heard in our current demos, but we're still not sure in what direction we'll take our next release.'
