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WYE OAK share striking new video
Last month, Wye Oak shared the title track from their hotly anticipated new album ‘The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs’, out April 6 via Merge worldwide. Today, they debut an accompanying music video, shot in the startling desert landscape of New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument by Dan Huiting.
The band sums it up best: “We went to the desert. It might seem hot, but it was actually cold. What is the point of all this? You’ll never outrun yourself. The past is always at your heels.”
For ‘The Louder…’, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack flew to one another’s cities—she in Durham, North Carolina, he in Marfa, Texas—for a week or so at a time, hunkering in home studios to sort through and combine their separate song sketches. These shorter stints together produced less second-guessing and hesitation in their process, yielding an unabashed and unapologetic Wye Oak. They discarded past rules about how to write a record, instead funnelling all those experiences and experiments into perfectly unified statements.
The result is some of the biggest, broadest and boldest music Wye Oak has ever made. ‘The Louder…’ pursues a litany of modern malaises, each of its dozen tracks diligently addressing a new conflict and pinning it against walls of sound, with the song’s subject and shape inextricably and ingeniously linked. It arrives at a time of immense doubt when our personal problems are infinitely compounded by a world that seems in existential peril. But these songs answer the challenge by radiating self-reflection and resolve, wielding hooks and musical intricacy as a shield against the madness of the moment.
‘The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs’ will be out worldwide on April 6; pre-orders are available today on CD and “sand & sky” (opaque beige & translucent blue) Peak Vinyl in the Merge store with an optional exclusive t-shirt bundle.