Rhye's short history is marked by serendipity and mystery. A couple of years ago, after being tapped by Hannibal's Copenhagen-based electronic group Quadron, producer/vocalist Mike Milosh flew to Denmark to work with the group and they hit it off. Eventually, Quadron producer Robin Hannibal moved to L.A. in pursuit of a woman, and Milosh coincidentally relocated there as well, and started his own serious relationship (which has since evolved into a marriage) before they reconnected musically.
From what Milosh has said, Rhye's primary goal is to pay tribute to this type of world-tilting romantic experience, but so far the pair have delivered their interpretations of this very personal phenomenon from behind a veil of secrecy. They released their first single, "Open", anonymously, and promoted it in a deliberately opaque fashion, like a YouTube video of Milosh serenading his wife with a solo piano rendition of the song, shot in a way where you can barely make him out in silhouette. Even after revealing their identities, the pair refuse to say where the group's name comes from or what it means, and their full names don't appear anywhere in the liner notes to their debut album, Woman.
Even without a face to attach it to, Rhye's music itself feels deeply intimate. Much of this comes from Hannibal and Milosh's deft arrangements-- each of Woman's 10 songs makes its point with a bare minimum of moving parts. Beats, basslines, and Milosh's voice are at the center of nearly all of them; although a majority of the tracks boast arrangements for horns and strings, most of these are so subtle that you might not even realize they're there until you read the liner notes afterward. The lean production leaves little space between the listener and the songs, and they feel almost touchably close.
And then of course there's Milosh's voice itself, a gorgeous and graceful countertenor that many listeners have mistaken for a woman's, especially in the days before the group unmasked themselves. He's a subtle performer, but also canny. The restraint that the pair shows in their arrangements also carries over to his singing, which rarely rises above the volume of a conversation. It's gentle, soothing, and easy to get lost in.
That voice has drawn a number of comparisons to Sade, and the music behind it only underlines those similarities. Woman offers few sounds or ways of deploying them that wouldn't be familiar to an R&B fan in the 90s, especially if they were into the British wing of the genre that at the time was focused on making gently bumping, slightly jazzy bedroom music.