Midnight sister today announce Painting The Roses, a new album out on 15th January via Jagjaguwar. Alongside the announcement the LA duo have shared a video for new single ‘Doctor Says’:
Painting The Roses, the follow up to 2017 debut album Saturn Over Sunset, is in many ways a fairy tale — not so much the sweet, happy-ending kind, more something richer, packed with imagination and rooted in the complex human messiness beneath a story’s artifice.
Juliana Giraffe, who fronts the band, describes it as ‘this tightrope of being real yet synthetic, organic yet staged, light yet dark, logical yet irrational, beautiful yet dilapidated. Joyful nonsense.’ Here, disguises such as masks are not meant to hide but to liberate, to ‘set a part of us free’, and Midnight Sister often embody this themselves, appearing highly stylised, curious, warm and inviting but a little askew.
Giraffe traveled to visit family in Argentina during the making of the album and reconnected greatly with that part of her family history, art and culture. Balouzian created the core album opener “Doctor Says” during a session in the desert outside of LA. The guitar, which reminded Giraffe of South America, has a slow, sweltering surf-tango to it, like Dick Dale doing Carlos Gardel. And even though the song was inspired by Giraffe’s reconnection with Argentina, the song is about the fading of some close friendships during the making of the album. “Man, you have changed,” Giraffe sings, unclear if tis directed to a friend or to herself.
Additionally, the Giraffe family, including Juliana, her sister, and mother, styled and designed the video for “Doctor Says.” Her character’s makeup is based on different plaster casts of her family members, with each character being a nod to both her family and her heritage.
Watch the ‘Doctor Says’ video
Album track Listing:
- Doctor Says
- Satellite
- Foxes
- Sirens
- Escalators
- Dearly Departed
- Tomorrowland
- My Elevator Song
- Wednesday Baby
- Limousine
- Song For The Trees
- Painting The Roses
As Midnight Sister, multi-disciplinary LA artists Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian make motion pictures. Yes sometimes with moving images – but most often only with the music they create together. Balouzian’s serpentine, string compositions are movie scenes that allow Giraffe, a brilliant character actor, to cloak herself in new roles and voices. A bit of Jon Brion’s score work; some old Hollywood strings and a solid dose of glam and disco from 70s independent cinema.
Balouzian is also responsible for scoring the recent documentary Feels Good Man, a tale exploring the transformation of Pepe the Frog.
