SATORI, a six-piece neo-soul band from Zagorje ob Savi, Slovenia, release their captivating new single “Walking” today, the lead track from their debut album ‘The Seat of the Soul,’ out now on Spotify and all major platforms. For North American listeners discovering them for the first time, SATORI arrive as something genuinely rare: a band steeped in soul, blues, jazz, and pop who have built a sound that feels both warmly familiar and entirely fresh, anchored by the extraordinary voice of vocalist Ursula Luthar and the rich keyboard and compositional vision of multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Jure Tori.
“Walking” is an irresistible introduction. Built around a groove that pulses with the rhythmic energy of city life, the song turns the sidewalk into a dance floor and the urban landscape into a full orchestral score: “Streets keep dancing all around / In the rhythm of a concrete sound / Cars invite them to a waltz / Fast and faster, what it costs? / Power lines provide the staff / Beat’s four-four, well, that’s enough.” It is the kind of song that moves your body before your mind catches up, and Luthar delivers it with a cool, soulful authority that will draw immediate comparisons to the finest voices in contemporary neo-soul.
The album behind it is a work of remarkable depth and ambition. ‘The Seat of the Soul’ was produced by Jamirko at Beyond Stereo Studio in Ljubljana and features ten tracks that range from the lush romantic imagery of “Find Me a Rhyme” to the mythic grandeur of “Prometheus Fire,” the quietly devastating portrait of “She,” and the tender permission of the closing track “Rest Now”: “Too long you’ve been plowing on, looking for something / The night’ll guide you / Make you believe you were always enough.” The ensemble includes Primož Grašič on guitar, Wolfram Derschmidt on double bass, Tijan Grašič on drums, and trumpet contributions from Gerhard Ornig and Jan Adamek across the album’s ten tracks, with cover illustration by painter Darko Slavec and released on the Slovenian label Klopotec.
Tori’s journey to this record is one of the more compelling creative origin stories in recent European music. Locked in his basement with his keyboards, he discovered the sounds of the Wurlitzer, Rhodes, and Hammond organ and recognised in them the palette he had always been searching for. He assembled musicians who could inhabit those sounds alongside him. There is, as he has noted himself, almost no music of this kind being made in Slovenia. SATORI are filling that space with something that belongs on the world stage, and ‘The Seat of the Soul’ is their opening argument.
TOUR DATES
July 3 — Trbovlje, Slovenia
July 17 — Ptuj, Slovenia
July 23 — Izola, Slovenia
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