Ex:Re :: Save As
Art pop: Elena Tonra’s second Ex:Re album keeps its demos inside the finished songs.
Eight years after Ex:Re’s first album, Elena Tonra has named the second after a command most of us use without thinking: the one that saves a file as a new copy.
Save As came out on 4AD on 30 October 2026. It is the second album by Ex:Re, the solo project of Daughter singer Elena Tonra. Fabian Prynn produces again; Tonra began work on these songs with him in 2023, starting from simple sketches. She is joined by Josephine Stephenson on cello, Hinako Omori on synthesisers, Ben Reed on bass and Jethro Fox on electric guitar.
The title is precise: many of these songs carry their first version inside the final one. “Sleep” began in a Paris hotel room. The acoustic guitar from that demo survives as a loop run through a vocoder and set against a drum machine, so the song reaches us muffled. “Radio Station” opens with an acoustic guitar, a voice, drums and a pop melody, then lifts them out of their usual setting until they grow strange, though never beyond recognition. The music stays emotionally accessible, but seems to arrive from another geography. Tonra has said that switching stations is how her mind works: pulled between feelings until it can no longer decide.
“Am I Even Real?”, a duet with Prynn, went the other way and found its shape in the studio. The spaceships in the lyric are a way of asking whether she is being honest with herself in a relationship. Underneath runs oblique pop, very much of the nineties: a thin guitar riff ticking out semiquavers over the 4/4, and a voice with a discreet wink in it.
The record bears traces of how it was made: lines from notebooks, files left on a laptop, first takes alongside later ones. During release week, Tonra is taking it round record shops, from Rough Trade East in London to Truck Store in Oxford.
