Libre Stone bring the vintage rock on their new album Mark Of Cain — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
Heralded by the hard-burning title-track single, the 11-song full-length makes a powerful and memorable introduction to the newly crowned British rock duo of guitarist Dion Smith and singer-lyricist Julian Orzabal, the brother of Tears For Fears co-founder Roland Orzabal. Fittingly enough, the duo met at a Tears For Fears fan group event at a pub in Bath.
“Dion Smith and I got chatting and he told me he played a bit of guitar — which was an outright lie,” Orzabal recalls. “He plays a lot of guitar, and plays it very well. I said I needed a couple of guitar solos for a project I was working on. A week or so later he sent me the solos, and they were great. He then asked me to write some lyrics on a tune he had, and I obliged. That was the start of Libre Stone.”
From there, the two would buckle down as musicians and songwriters, bouncing ideas off one another and creating the sound that would eventually shape the band. “We soon realized we were a great combination for writing together because he brought the ideas to the areas I was not so good at, and I brought the missing parts of the puzzle to the areas he was not so good at,” Dion says. “So, it just worked! We continued to write and realized, the more we worked together, the easier the process became and the better the songs were.”
After writing the album remotely during the pandemic — “You would think it would be really difficult to make music — but it was quite the opposite,” Dion says. “It was actually very rare for us to come up with ideas that the other person didn’t like, and everything always seemed to click in place” — the duo recruited an A-list team of guest musicians to round out their sound: Jamie Wollam (drums), Andy Carr (bass), and Michael Wainwright and Guy Townley (backing vox). “I think they both really understood what we were trying to do, and the sound we were trying to achieve,” Dion says. “And, of course, with the additional backing vocals from Michael and Guy, it brought everything to how Julian and I imagined everything would sound.”
The title track Mark Of Cain brings their plans to impressive fruition, busting out of the gate with a darkly menacing guitar riff that drives the low-slung tune and underpins Orzabal’s gruff vocals. Watch the video above, listen to the entire album below, and keep up with Libre Stone at their website, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
