Artist: Stanley Brinks
Title: Happy New Year
Format: 12" silver vinyl
Cat#: Fika109LP
Release date: 6 June 2025
Bandcamp
The prodigiously prolific Stanley Brinks’ (f.k.a. André Herman Dune) releases his latest album Happy New Year.
Happy New Year follows a series of acclaimed albums with The Wave Pictures, a pair of folk shanty and old-time calypso albums alongside Norway’s The Kaniks, and is scheduled for release shortly after another new record from Stanley, Iron Eye, this time alongside longtime collaborator and touring-partner Clemence Freschard.
Freschard appears on drums throughout Good Moon, with backing vocals from guests including anti-folk legend Jeffrey Lewis, The Burning Hell’s Mathias Kom, The Moldy Peaches’ Toby Goodshank and Maltese multimedia artist Alexandra Aquilina.
Stanley Brinks is renowned for his unique anti-folk style: both playful and suggestive, insightful and entertaining.
Brinks was born in Paris, France, in 1973. He studied a bit of biology and worked as a nurse for a while. Half Swedish, half Moroccan, strongly inclined to travel the world, he soon began spending most of his life on the road and developed a strong relationship with New York. By the late 90s he’d become a full time singer-songwriter – André Herman Düne – as part of three piece indie-rock band, Herman Düne. Several albums and Peel sessions later and after a decade of touring Europe, mostly with American songwriters such as Jeffrey Lewis, Calvin Johnson and early Arcade Fire he settled in Berlin. The early carnival music of Trinidad became a passion, and in the early 21st century he became the unquestioned master of European calypso, changing his name to Stanley Brinks. Under this moniker he has recorded more than 100 albums, collaborated with the New York Antifolk scene on several occasions, recorded and toured with traditional Norwegian musicians, and played a lot with The Wave Pictures.
