Beloved British indie-pop duo Summer Camp – AKA married couple Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Warmsley – share details of their new album ‘Romantic Comedy’, their first new record since 2015. ‘Romantic Comedy’ will be released on Valentine’s Day via Apricot Recordings, and is the companion piece to Sankey’s feature documentary film debut of the same name, which last year premiered at prestigious film festivals IFFR (Rotterdam), SXSW (Austin, Texas) and AFI Fest (LA).
Summer Camp’s new album ‘Romantic Comedy’ features songs from and inspired by Sankey’s film, and the experiences and movies that compelled her to make it, intercut with snippets of Warmsley’s instrumental score and samples from the documentary. The band describe the album as “a painfully honest love letter that both celebrates and skewers the way romance has historically been portrayed in cinema, and how these depictions have affected the way the audience conducts and pursues their own relationships.”
The film is a sometimes sardonic, sometimes loving, but always personal exploration of this much-maligned genre, told through clips from over 160 films including When Harry Met Sally, God’s Own Country and His Girl Friday and interviews with actors, filmmakers and writers including Jessica Barden (star of End Of The F*cking World).
To coincide with the film’s premiere, Summer Camp last year shared lead double A-side singles ‘Love of My Life’ / ‘Danny and John’, a first taste of new music from ‘Romantic Comedy’. ‘Love of My Life’, the first cut from the album, is a 60s-inspired pop banger that longs for a lost love, the one that got away, while ‘Danny and John’, which doesn’t appear on the film’s soundtrack, was inspired by classic rom-coms like Sleepless In Seattle and In & Out.
Summer Camp were formed in 2009 by Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Warmsley. They released their first single ‘Ghost Train’ on Moshi Moshi in early 2010, which led the way for their debut album ‘Welcome To Condale’, and following records ‘Summer Camp, Beyond Clueless’ (their first original film score) and ‘Bad Love’. During this time the band toured with the likes of Robyn, Metronomy and Wild Beasts.
Having released four albums and three EPs in the space of six years, the duo decided to take a break from Summer Camp to explore other creative projects. Sankey began exploring a new medium: filmmaking. In 2017, she began work on what became her first feature documentary film, ‘Romantic Comedy’, which premiered in 2019 and is set for international distribution in 2020.
Meanwhile, Warmsley found success as a film & TV composer, collaborating with comedian Simon Amstell on his debut feature Carnage (BBC, 2017) and with Charlie Lyne on Fear Itself and his award-winning Fish Story (Guardian, 2017) amongst many others. He also began working as a solo artist: in 2018 he released a solo track, ‘Moment’, which was featured on the BBC/Netflix drama Wanderlust starring Toni Colette, and in 2019 started a project called ‘A Year’, where he wrote and released a new track every month.
TOUR DATES:
EYOE PRESENTS: Summer Camp at the Lexington, London – May 28th 2020