Indigo Sparke shares a video “Hysteria,” the title track from her forthcoming Aaron Dessner-produced album out October 7th via Sacred Bones.
“This song is about being inside of love, right at the edge of hysteria,” says Sparke “There is often an axis point in things. A place where things can tip into chaos or become unhinged. A marker point. As beautiful and turbulent as these moments are, sometimes it’s hard to return from them to a place that makes sense and feels safe. I think for so long and maybe still, sometimes, I find it hard to keep my balance in love. So many fireworks. So many sorry’s. So much hope. So much deep yearning. So much joy. So much poignant reflection in the tidal pools of intimacy. This song was the birth place of the whole album. I had this song and the title before the rest found a home inside of this world too. I am still trying to unravel the bitter sweet nature of love and longing. What it means to truly let go. What it means to truly love.”
Video director Nina Gofur on the “Hysteria” video:
“”Indigo’s voice has this unique vulnerability to it. It’s simultaneously tender and raw, yet possesses a lot of strength. Her lyrics wrap around you like a silver thread, stitching together different feelings you’ve been afraid to acknowledge. When I first heard the song I wanted to honor the feeling it elicited – an ode to reconciling the parts of yourself that seem to be in a tug of war. Indigo’s constant motion paints a blurred image of her either running away or returning to herself. Ultimately, she welcomes Hysteria as a guest; a temporary visitor. I wanted the visual to speak to the temporality of Hysteria and all the beautifully complex feelings it brings.”
Indigo Sparke shares a video for “Blue,” the stunning new single and opening track from her anticipated new Aaron Dessner-produced album, Hysteria. The album, a huge and beautiful sweeping work that possesses a rare and reflective power, is due October 7th via Sacred Bones.
“This is one of the closest songs to my heart I have ever written. It was a freak accident that came out all in one go, the words, it just didn’t stop pouring out. Everything in shades of Blue,” says Sparke. “I had just gotten back to Australia from New York and the pandemic hit shortly after. I was in some sort of strange altered state of reality, deep in a grief wave and a relationship death. It felt like something was trying to purge itself out of me. Maybe rage. Maybe hope. Maybe love. I can’t fully explain how deeply I feel this song inside of me. It just is. Like my blood pumping through my veins.”
From the first few notes in “Blue,” something chilling and captivating pierces straight into the listener’s chest and carries through the rest of the album. With harmonies reminiscent of the voices in our heads, Sparke examines love, loss, grief, a newly realized rage, her history, dreams, and the emotional weather patterns surrounding those sensations: her words tell the stories, and the sounds act them out. It’s a diary built for big stages.
More from Indigo Sparke on “Blue”:
“blue. the bruise. the holding. blue hope. violent blue. blue lightening. a canopy of blue. burning blue inside the flame. blue in her womb. blue was the name my mother gave me. tender blue. blue like a glacial plane of memory. blue like joni. blue is the history inside me. primal blue. opulent blue. wild blue.
a galloping passage of time. blue waves of love and the sculpture that we built of ours. this is the odyssey of my heart.”
Video director Angela Ricciardi on the “Blue” video:
“This video is an ode to a city that has shown me continual moments of both wonder and ferocity. Indigo came to me with the initial idea of creating a video that follows her walking throughout the city, and I think that “Blue”, in all of its beauty and severity, is a fitting soundtrack to that universal experience. My creative approach was informed by characteristic time quality: seeing everything in a stage of becoming, which requires simultaneous patience and immediacy. I like when something forces me to look. Like falling in love, when time slows and you notice the dance of life that we all belong to. That’s where the magic happens.”
Indigo Sparke announces her new album, Hysteria, with a Madeline Clayton-directed video for lead single “Pressure In My Chest.”
The album, a huge and beautiful sweeping work that possesses a rare and reflective power, is produced by Aaron Dessner (Taylor Swift, The National) and due October 7th via Sacred Bones.
Of the song, Sparke says “In the birth of memory, there is the eternal moment of time. All things exist here. Through night dreams and wishes, and hot tears and laughing stars, I carried myself to the desert to traverse the landscape of history and reconcile the ever present Pressure in my Chest.”
After moving back to New York from her native Australia in the spring of 2021, Sparke finished writing the album’s 14 songs and decamped upstate with producer Aaron Dessner. “I just had a really strong intuitive gut feeling that I would do this album with Aaron. We had met once years before in Eau Claire so I asked my manager to reach out to him. When we first talked, we talked about co-writing from scratch, I did have a big folder of demos but was nervous to share them, but after he heard them he said, ‘There’s so much to work with in here already,’” Sparke recalls on how Dessner, who also contributes instrumentation along with multi-instrumentalist and long time collaborator Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Matt Barrick (The Walkmen, Muzz), got involved in bringing Hysteria to life. “Aaron is such an incredible person, to feel his generosity and to feel him in my corner is a true gift. It definitely took a moment for me to get used to a different way of working and hand my trust and heart over to him and his vision but it also felt so natural and we became close friends in the process.”
The connection felt intuitive for both Sparke and Dessner who recalls “I started hearing ideas listening to her voice almost immediately. We connected by phone and had a long talk. She was incredibly open and gracious and really it was creatively inspiring from the moment we started working. It always feels like some weird miracle when songs emerge that you want to listen to all the time — and this was definitely the case with her record. It feels cohesive and timeless and inspired to me in a way that I know I will keep coming back to. I think the chemistry is right.” Centering Sparke’s powerful vocals throughout, Hysteria is packed with big guitars and layered instrumentation that practically acts as the album’s lungs, giving every note breath. If Echo bore the mark of producer Adrianne Lenker’s intimate, spectral approach, then Hysteria is comparatively full-bodied and warm like a raging fire, as Dessner’s ornate instrumentation perfectly compliment Sparke’s songwriting. The result is music that sounds timeless.
Marissa Nadler reveals the new single/video, “Couldn’t Have Done the Killing,” from her forthcoming album, The Path of the Clouds, out October 29th on Sacred Bones and Bella Union. “Couldn’t Have Done the Killing” is an ominous follow-up to “If I Could Breathe Underwater” and “Bessie, Did You Make It?.”
The accompanying video, directed by Tyler Derryberry and Christen Dute, pays homage to iconic TV series such as Unsolved Mysteries and In Search of…
“When Marissa came to us to make a video for a song on her new album, we were already aware of the album’s themes and her inspirations,” explain Derryberry and Dute. “While she was writing and recording the album sequestered at home during the pandemic, we stayed in touch, sharing our media diet of true crime and the paranormal. We exchanged links to podcasts about Skinwalkers, recommended our favorite serial killer documentaries, and discussed our favorite theories about DB Cooper.”
“We set out to recreate that moment in time when murders and bank robberies shared an equal plausibility with hauntings and high strangeness. Remember when innocently entertaining a conspiracy theory or two seemed to have no cultural or political consequences? When Coast To Coast AM would have us believing the government was hiding a UFO in a hangar somewhere, but no one was going to storm the capital over it?”
“The settings of Massachusetts and Maine appropriately enhanced the New England vibe of our and Marissa’s tone. Cabins older than the Great Depression and cemeteries older than the Revolutionary War are everywhere. Apartment buildings where college students still live today were the scenes of murders fifty years ago. Everybody seems to own an ax. We even did some shooting in Cumberland County, Maine, where Stephen King’s fictional town of Salem’s Lot is located. Turn on the camera, point it at the dark, and the witchiness just seems to seep in on its own.” @marissa_nadler
Marissa Nadler announces her ninth solo album, The Path of the Clouds, out October 29th on Sacred Bones & Bella Union, and shares the lead video, “Bessie, Did You Make It?” The Path of the Clouds is the most stylistically adventurous, lyrically transfixing, and melodically sophisticated collection of songs in her already rich discography. Gripped by wanderlust while suddenly housebound at the start of the pandemic in 2020, Nadler escaped into writing, and came back with a stunning set of songs about metamorphosis, love, mysticism, and murder. Blurring the line between reality and fantasy and moving freely between past and present, these 11 deeply personal, self-produced songs find Nadler exploring new landscapes, both sonic and emotional.
While she’s always been a brilliant guitarist, Nadler challenged herself to expand her palette for The Path of the Clouds, experimenting with synthetic textures that make the album feel untethered from time and space. Nadler also learned to play piano during the pandemic’s isolation, and she composed many of the songs on the album on keys rather than guitar, which further contributed to their exploratory feel. These songs are unmistakably Marissa Nadler’s, but they sound free to go places she’s never gone before.
One of Nadler’s distractions during the 2020 quarantine was binging reruns of Unsolved Mysteries. As she watched, she began to notice parallels between many of its stories and her own life. What began as a writing exercise became the bedrock of her songwriting process, as she came to inhabit the narratives that had so fascinated her. In lead single “Bessie, Did You Make It?,” Nadler inverts the canon of the murder ballad, crafting a narrative of female empowerment and survival.
The accompanying video was directed by Thou’s Mitch Wells who says, “When I first got the chance to hear Marissa’s new album, and was asked, ‘Which song would you like to do a video for?’ I sort of panicked because literally every song is SO good. It was like being at a buffet of all your favorite food and only being able to choose one thing to eat. I had a blast making the video, but there was always the pressure of ‘don’t let down the song.’ It’s such a beautiful opening track and I’m really lucky I was given the chance to be a part of it.”
