El Perro Del Mar (a.k.a. Sarah Assbring) most recently offered up a tender reworking of the late Prince's "I Would Die 4 U," but will be back onto promoting her own songbook by the fall. A new album titled KoKoro touches down September 16 via Control Group. A press release notes that the upcoming 10-song release, Assbring's first full-length since 2012's Pale Fire, is "her most ambitious and musically adventurous to date." Apparently, the record explores the sounds of Chinese string instrument guzheng, the Japanese shakuhachi flute, dulcimer and Ethiopian music-minded rhythms. KoKoro was recorded by El Perro Del Mar and Jacob Haage, and features performances from multi-instrumentalist Andreas S?derstr?m, bassist Johan Berthling, drummer Mattias Bergqvist (First Aid Kit), and wind instrument specialist Per "Rusktr?sk" Johansson (Robyn, Jos? Gonz?lez). On a lyrical front, the album is said to have Assbring on toxic capitalism ("Ding Sum"), though the full-length also touches on the environment and the condition of the human heart. She explained in a statement: KoKoro is about the vulnerability and the strength of the heart. What the heart is exposed to, both internally and externally. The heart cannot be protected. Not from pain, not from happiness. Not from love, not from corruption. I've been thinking a lot about issues such as 'who am I if the social norms, expectations and pressures I carry were to be stripped away? Hard? Soft? Or maybe both? In a time that seems to go backwards humanistically and morally, seeking to put up walls rather than tearing them down, I realized I wanted to make a borderless album that belongs nowhere but has a universal voice and a universal heart.
