The first album in four years from Sam Shepherd [AKA Floating Points] took five intense weeks to record and it features what he describes as “some of the most obtuse, strange, difficult music of my life.”
A massive feature of the campaign was his on-going creative relationship with Barcelona-based studio Hamill Industries, whose vision was to create a constant dialogue between the music and the visuals. The campaign and live show visuals focus on the natural world, where landscapes are responsive to the music and rainbow swirls of bubbles morph to the kick of the bass drum, and provided a striking aesthetic continuity throughout the album release and onwards through Sam’s touring schedule.
The video for first album single ‘Last Bloom’ was filmed over 30 days and involved several scale models, a five-axis robot arm, lasers, motion controls and 3D printed 14 meters of tunnels. To illustrate this incredible process we released a “making of” video.
Ahead of the album announcement, Floating Points released a standalone single ‘LesAlpx’ / ‘Coorabell’. We teased this with a Spotify takeover changing all his profile imagery to single artwork visuals and utilised a first set of visual loops as Canvases for all his back catalogue tracks.
A huge, multifaceted partnership with Spotify UK also ran throughout the campaign for Crush, including large-scale, bespoke projection-mapping of the album visuals across Ely’s Yard in London and a microsite launched on release day, giving fans the chance to view exclusive, reactive visuals by Hamill Industries while listening to the album on Spotify. We uploaded further bespoke, visual Canvases for each album track and created a wide suite of social assets for artist, label and Spotify to support the album, projections event and website online.
An exclusive album playback took place at Public Records in New York ahead of album release, with key industry contacts and fans listening to Crush for the first time alongside album visuals, followed by a Q&A with Sam by noted journalist Andy Beta (Pitchfork, Fader).
Sam also celebrated the album release by hosting a six-hour NTS show on Monday 28th October featuring high profile guests, including Jamie xx, Ben UFO, Caribou, Midland, Pearson Sound, Mafalda Elkka, Zach Cowie and more. Sam has also announced the return of his monthly residency on the station.
• Crush has entered the Official UK Albums Chart Top 40 at #37, being the first Floating Points record to reach the Top 40.
• The album went straight to #1 in the UK Dance Chart, #4 in the UK Indie Chart, #4 in the UK Vinyl Chart and #1 in the US Billboard Electronic Chart.
• Crush received extensive marketing support from Spotify on release week on top of the aforementioned projections and website campaign, including a global homepage banner, a UK & US Premium Homepage Takeover and organic and paid social support. Floating Points’ monthly listeners on Spotify have nearly quadrupled. Sam was featured in five New Music Friday playlists and was featured on the cover of their Altar playlist. Crush has accumulated 5.46m+ streams across Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube to date.
• Reviews for Crush have been extremely positive — Pitchfork have given the album their prestigious Best New Music accolade with an excellent 8.3 score, Mixmag have made the release their Album Of The Month with a brilliant 9/10 rating and The New York Times ran a full-length feature and interview.
• Sam was a guest on the Gilles Peterson BBC 6 Music show and ‘Crush’ was BBC 6 Music’s Album Of The Day.
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