Ariel Bui releases new album between "Real & Fantasy"

The Nashville based singer / songwriter Ariel Bui has released her newest studio LP, Real & Fantasy and shared an accompanying music video.

Released today via Audio Network, the new record from Ariel Bui, titled Real & Fantasy is a personal and uplifting rock record that incorporates elements of country, blues, soul, surf, and psych rock into a unique sound that should appeal to fans of artists like Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten and Courtney Barnett. If you like your indie rock a little on the twangy side, or if you like your alt country to lean a little towards the world of indie rock ala Rilo Kiley, this is a record you wont want to miss.

The release of the album is accompanied by a music video for album title track "Real & Fantasy" which you can watch below:

This new album reunites Ariel with Grammy-nominated producer Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes, Hurray for the Riff Raff), with the entire new LP recorded at his Nashville studio, The Bomb Shelter. The album also features a team of seasoned Nashville musicians who helped bring Real & Fantasy to life – including Jo Schornikow (Phosphorescent) on Piano & Keys, Megan Coleman (Jenny Lewis, Yola) on drums, Jack Lawrence (Jack White, The Dead Weather) on bass, and Ellen Angelico(She’s A Rebel) on guitar. The album and song title comes from a line in the song’s chorus: “Always on the edge of something real & fantasy”. Describing her inspiration for the lyric and why she ended up choosing this as the album’s title, Ariel says that she “loved the phrase Real & Fantasy for the title of the album, because unlike the more commonly used phrase ‘real or fantasy’ it kind of highlighted for me that life is a combination of reality AND our dreams.”

Diving further into the themes and inspirations of Real & Fantasy, Bui sees this new record as “a sort of coming of age album for my 30s, with the story starting from my teenage years and concluding with the present day. I started with remembering what it was like to be young, experience hardships, have crushes, first loves, and fun. Throughout the journey, more adult themes slowly interweave throughout the story, whether it be the realities and responsibilities of ‘adulting’, the complications of how to define relationships that don’t fall within our societal norms, and exploring our identities, sexualities, and insecurities.”

Real & Fantasy is available to stream now and also available for purchase on Bandcamp