Vallis Alps Announce Debut Album ‘Cleave’ and Share New Single

February 23, 2023

More than eight years after forming, electronic duo Vallis Alps have announced they will release their debut album, Cleave, later in 2023.

Set to arrive on Thursday, 24th August via Sony-owned distributor The Orchard, Cleave follows two EPs from the duo of vocalist Parissa Tosif and producer David Ansari. Coinciding with the announcement, the band have shared new single ‘Higher Than This’ alongside a Tanmay Chowdhary-directed video.

Vallis Alps – ‘Higher Than This’

‘Higher Than This’ is the third single Vallis Alps have shared from Cleave, following ‘Set It Off, Set It Right’ in November and ‘On the Eve of the Rush’ in December last year. The duo recently released a remix of the latter titled ‘On the Eve of the Rush [134bpm VIP]’.

“Our album emerges from a process that was long, at times toilsome and beautifully vulnerable,” Tosif and Ansari said of Cleave in a joint statement. “These songs were a tool for us to go deeper into the challenges in our friendship, big life changes, relationships with those around us and cycles of thought we had never really explored.”

They continued: “Authenticity was our guide during the writing process. We live in a world crowded by inauthenticity, and our constant pivot for writing songs was whether the themes, instrumentation, and process were honouring the spirit of what we wanted to contribute to the world.”

Through this process, said Tosif and Ansari, the making of Cleave has given them greater clarity about who they are as people. “It represents an evolution for us on a personal and sonic level, learning to deal with a new level of complexity as we learnt about detachment outsourcing, and sticking to our strengths – far from the initial years of Vallis where we tried to do everything ourselves.”

Vallis Alps will showcase material from Cleave at a pair of Australian shows next month, their first local gigs since 2017. Tickets for the two shows – at The Night Cat in Naarm/Melbourne and Eora/Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory – are sold out.