SOAK has today released a video for ‘Déjà Vu’, the lead single from her anticipated second album Grim Town, which will be released on April 26th on Rough Trade Records.
Director Brother Willis whose credits include recent videos for Parquet Courts and Beirut calls the ‘Déjà Vu’ video “a looping, nonsensical, Lynchian dream,” and explains further that his goal “was to make a disconnected and confusing performance video, one that recasts Bridie as both performer, then observer, and back and forth in dreamlike messiness. I have a bit of an obsession with vintage TV talk show musical performances and tend to have lots of ‘work’ dreams. Familiarly confusing dream structure and absurdity that vaguely resembles a film set. So that’s the starting point here: a dream talk show performance ambiguous and confusing.”
Watch ‘Déjà Vu’ below:
‘Déjà Vu’
is a further window into SOAK’s hugely accomplished second album ‘Grim Town’, which follows the success of Bridie’s multi prize winning 2015 debut album ‘Before We Forgot How To Dream’. Its central premise, says the still just 22 year old, is “a dystopia that I’ve created in my brain: me on the inside, processed into a pretend location. The way I could wrap my head around a lot of what I was going through was to make it feel like something quite physical and real. Once I had the idea of the album being an actual location, exploring the dynamics of this town and what it would look or sound like felt like the right way to give my mental state a personality.” So if ‘Before We Forgot How To Dream’ was conceived as a time capsule of innocence, vividly capturing those moments in adolescence when anything felt possible, ‘Grim Town’ perhaps examines the reality of what happens next, after you enter adulthood (but actually feel more in crisis than ever), and the world around you isn’t what was promised to you or your generation.
A record about getting lost that you can, also, truly get lost in, ‘Grim Town’ sees Bridie tackling everything from long distance love, depression, divorce and social anxiety to the changing modern landscape (sexually, politically, emotionally) with unflinching honesty. An acceptance of the jumble of emotions that makes you ‘you’ emerges as the ultimate message of the album, with its suitably placeless universe in which everybody’s personal ‘Grim Town’ looks different, but everybody’s matters.
