Artisan Loyalist
Artisan Loyalist is the solo project of Edmonton-based musician, Rob Batke.
His latest full-length effort, Petrolia, arrives October 4th, 2024.
While maintaining the electronic underpinning of previous work, this nine-song collection is a confluence of sonics and thematic elements ranging from 90s rock and fingerstyle guitar, gauzy prestalgia within shoegaze and sampling, and pre-y2k media contending with the modern dystopia.
Petrolia contrasts two overlapping, inward perspectives in this Venn-like milieu as themes grapple with finding liminal space between these trajectories.
From 2006 to 2014, Batke was a member of Faunts, a seminal Canadian shoegaze band, featuring his brothers Tim and Steven Batke. Together, they released their breakthrough EP, M4 (2006) and an album, Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. (2009), plus several of their songs appeared in TV shows and video games, including the Mass Effect franchise.
During this time, Batke quietly honed his skills as a solo electronic producer and played a handful of shows as Artisan Loyalist. After Faunts decided to take a break, Batke branched out on his own and remixed other artists, including Sweden’s MF/MB, and Denmark’s Treefight for Sunlight.
In 2012, Batke’s laptop was destroyed. After a brief period of devastation, he entered a pivotal and productive writing journey, which led to his first EP, You’re Glory, in 2013. He was also commissioned for a remix of 'Gazelle' by synth-pop artist André Obin, which led to Artisan Loyalist signing to New York’s Sky Council Recordings.
His second release, The Ace EP, came out as a teaser in 2014 just as Batke reassembled a live band to further realize the songs with a debut at the CMJ Music Marathon in New York City, followed by releasing the full-length debut, Lonely Ghost, in 2015. The album is an expansive and beautiful tour of dreamy pop melodies and electronic textures. With a collection of remixes from artists including Teen Daze, Khotin, and Meet Me In Orbit, Lonely Ghost Remixes was also released in 2015.
The second full-length album, Caustics, was released in 2018. These nine songs feel warm and wistful—a modern take on ‘80s arena pop and mesmerizing electronic rhythms juxtaposed by heavy distortion pedals.
2020 was a year of introspection, and as such, Batke released X O X O, a rediscovered collection of instrumental and ambient material derived from an unrealized scoring project dating a few years back following on the heels of Lonely Ghost.
In the years following, Batke amassed a number of musical ideas that would formulate the new full-length album, Petrolia. Its lead single, the title track sharing the same namesake, arrives August 23rd, 2024.
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