Hailing from the small city of Jonkoping, Sweden, Loney Dear’s primary member Emil Svanängen first began recording homemade, overdubbed tapes of delicate, folkish indie pop in the early 2000s. As Loney, Dear (the band has since deleted the comma from its name), Svanängen self-released three homemade CD-Rs through his website: River Fontana Redux, Citadel Band, and Sologne.

As buzz developed through MP3 blogs and other new media manifestations, Sub Pop offered Svanängen a contract in 2006. The first proper Loney Dear album, Loney, Noir, was released in early 2007. After several years of touring stateside and abroad, Loney Dear released Dear John, its fourth full-length and first on Polyvinyl, in January.

In November 2009, Polyvinyl released Citadel Band on vinyl for the first time ever.

After his last time touring the United States in support of 2009’s Dear John, Emil Svanängen returned home to Sweden and began to play shows with chamber orchestras throughout the country.

To successfully accomplish this feat, he was forced to revisit his earlier material—re-writing and re-arranging these older songs for performance on a grander scale.

This experience had an indelible influence on the writing and recording of his latest album—the appropriately titled Hall Music, an expansive record that finds Svanängen closer to creating the type of orchestral music he has always sought to bring to life on stage (whether he’s actually playing with an orchestra or not).