ByDS’s new album Our Long Weekend takes listeners on a danceable odyssey through 24 years of shared life, creativity, and love. Bee and Diego, the duo at the heart of the project, are not simply collaborators, they are partners in every sense, and their music pulses with the intimacy and honesty that can only come from a long-unfolding story. Based in Berlin but rooted in diverse cultural traditions, ByDS blends electronic beats, analog synths, guitars, and multilingual vocals to craft a deeply personal and universally engaging album. Love, in its many forms, is the connective tissue here, romantic, nostalgic, playful, self-reflective, and spiritual. The result is a nine-song journey that feels like dancing through life’s most intimate moments, carried on rhythmic waves of joy, longing, doubt, and renewal. Our Long Weekend immediately invites listeners into a storytelling and texture-rich soundscape. Bee and Diego met in their twenties when life felt spacious and carefree, a long weekend that never quite ended. As the album deepens, it traces that youthful promise through years of growth, change, and reconnection. Each track becomes a confessional yet celebratory personal letter and communal anthem. ByDS refuses to be bounded by a singular music genre. DnB, techno, trip-hop, Latin rhythms, New Wave, and Brit-pop echoes all swirl together, not as a back-of-the-book genre listing, but as a lived-in palette. Synthesizers shimmer quietly behind the acoustic guitar, deep bass throbs beneath subtle drum programming, electric guitar cracks through grooves, and the beats are supple and precise, built to make people move, but never at the expense of mood.
Their vocal performance continuously levitates between conversation and storytelling. Sometimes duet, sometimes solo, sometimes one steps back to let the other speak. They sing in English, German, and Spanish, a linguistic handshake that underscores their cultural connection and their ability to span emotional distance, resulting in a lovely, natural, layered, conversational, personal polyphony. They also confront complexity, fear, regret, and the unruly mess of lived life, while refusing descent into melancholy. Instead, they orient toward lightness. Not the flippant kind, but the clear-eye kind learned from years of loving. They invite the listener to waltz through the unsteady ground, emotional cracks included, with confidence that you will still find a solid center at the end. This material doesn’t feel like a playlist or a pastiche of styles. Instead, all nine songs carry a shared emotional atlas. The production is handmade, with each synth, beat, and guitar line carefully modulated to serve snapshot moments of intimacy or movement. The beats maintain steady momentum, but their grooves are curved by vulnerability and experience. There are cinematic moments here. Some tracks open expansively, like dawn light slipping across a room. Others build suspense, shimmering with emotional twilight or late-night honesty. Despite its danceable pulse, this is music meant to be listened to with intention. It is immersive in feeling. Bee’s voice, in particular, stands out for its subtlety and emotional presence. She never over-sings, replacing vocal acrobatics with delicate inflections that convey more by their absence. Diego’s tone adds gentle grounding, his lines often carrying fragility beneath confident phrasing. Together, their voices anchor the album. You sense that each note is part of a conversation between two people who have known time in all its forms. As a listener, you are drawn into the circle.
Their lyrical approach is poetic and straightforward. The album feels reflective but never distant. They do not wallow in complexity. Instead, they lay out moments like memory, discovery, and desire with economy and warmth. Lines about reinvention or breaking boundaries feel born from experience, not trends. There is faith in each other, music, in the small and glowing moments that define longer lives shared together. Within the context of Berlin’s vibrant underground and electronic scene, ByDS stands apart because of its emotional ambition. Many local acts focus on the cerebral or the sensory, but Our Long Weekend wants feeling. It wants an emotional connection and it finds it in the labor of music, hand-built, layered, and patient. It talks to the listener as a collaborators. Let’s think, move, remember, let’s let a beat carry us. The production truly stands out and uplifts these compositions to an entirely new level. It is intimate enough to have been made in their apartment studio, but seasoned enough to feel carefully crafted. It is a rare production skill, intimacy and clarity without flattening rawness. The analog synths sound vibrant and sometimes frayed. The electronic beats click with just enough imperfection to feel alive. The guitars may sparkle or hum beneath, but they sound human, played by hands that trust their feeling over perfection. In distinguishing between live show impact and recorded nuance, Our Long Weekend favors the nuance but gives enough pulse to hold the dance floor. This album is layered. It holds space for dancing while also rewarding hushed listening.
In the years since their debut 2018 EP, ByDS have grown in confidence. They explore themes of partnership and identity rather than just sing about them, resulting in a personal, layered, and ambitious record. Our Long Weekend could be a moment in many lives, not just theirs. It is love in translation, melody, meter, drum machine click, analog hum, straddling three decades, four languages, and two continents. It gives you space to move and feel. From the beginning to end of Our Long Weekend, you hear two lives converging in sound, distinct but tethered. Sometimes one voice steps forward, sometimes the other. Sometimes they meld but the tonal center remains steady. It is a portrait of companionate creation. Does the album need vocals? Could the soundscapes carry the emotion by themselves? Perhaps. But the sincerity of their voices, spoken in extraordinary partnership, makes the music glow. Without them, Our Long Weekend might still pulse. Nine tracks, each wrapped in light and shadow. It is an ode to a long relationship, but also to reinvention, risk, breaking and renewing, dancing while you bleed emotionally, remembering that the long weekend you once had together can still exist now, even under heavier skies. ByDS’s Our Long Weekend is an album you will come back to. Then you will press play again to catch every inflection, breath, and choice. And when the music ends, you will sense something lasting underneath all those beats. This record lives in the space of need and light. It understands the struggle and the release and sings of that understanding with grace and pulse. Highly recommended for anyone who appreciates music with heart and soul.
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