AOR BLVD RECORDS

This self-titled debut album from Hardware ’86 is all about capturing the sound and vibe of late eighties melodic rock and AOR music, staying true to both the sound production aesthetics and the genre. Four of the songs comes from Sigurd´s master thesis at NTNU back in 2012, where Rune contributed with songwriting, guitars and some vocals. The scope of the project was to recreate the sound of the late eighties soft rock productions, which both of us had a big heart for. In addition to those four songs, we made the nostalgic song ‘Summer of ’91’ (2016), which is about an eighties rocker that is sensing a change in the music scene, and especially ‘Nirvana’´s big breakthrough with the album ‘Nevermind’ at the end of 1991. So, the summer of ’91 was the last summer before eighties rock finally got outdated, at least when it comes to the big commercial side. The last song, ‘Share This Love’, is inspired by the Swedish AOR band, Work of Art, which we were completely blown away by the first time we heard it.
 

Influences for the album:

Toto, Journey, Def Leppard, Bad English, Work of Art, Vince DiCola, Starship, Van Halen, TNT

BIO:

The band Hardware ’86 takes you back to the sound and vibe of the late 1980’s hard rock scene. They celebrate a shameless cocktail of heavy guitars, soft synths, melodic leads and big 80s drums. The band consist of Rune Aalberg Alstad (guitar / vocals) and Sigurd Ekle (bass / vocals) and misc session musicians (complete list below).

Rune and Sigurd met at NTNU (Norwegian University of Technology and Science), while they studied Music technology together. They had a common musical passion for shameless eighties melodic rock, totally different (and "forbidden") from the rest of the students making electro acoustic music ('pling-plong') and putting microphones on a bathtub!

Rune managed to convince Sigurd to do a master thesis where the aim was to recreate the sound of the late eigthies sound aestehtics. This was the start of the band. We had a lot of fun exploring eigthies sounds and vibes, and writing, recording and producing eighties songs. We even got to know the secret recipe behind the famous guitar sound on the song 10000 Lovers (in one) by TNT, and recreated this process in the studio. Check out the monster guitar sound in the song T L M from our current album release.

See you back in ’86!