“Only Strangers Are Normal is Controllar's first studio album. After touring extensively and focusing on producing a great live show, we wanted to explore the potential of the studio experience. While on an art residency in Brussels we found a studio in Rue de la Glacier (Ice Street) which was formerly the refrigerated storage space of the city; the studio itself was an enormous old underground refrigerator. We hermetically closed ourselves from the outside world for an intense week of writing and recording and during these seven days Only Strangers Are Normal was born. Only Strangers Are Normal is a darkly sinister and powerful album connecting our experiences of being strangers in a new town with the heightened euphoria and isolation of being on tour. The title considers the phenomena that the closer you get, the less normal things start to appear. As you scratch the surface of artificial first encounters, the image of what is 'regular' or 'normal' begins to contort and eventually dissolves into the chaos of the everyday."—T.M.