Videos

SON LUX share video for “A Different Kind of Love”

• 29th Apr 2021

With the third and final volume of their ambitious three-part album, ‘Tomorrows’ set for release this Friday, April 16th via City Slang, SON LUX have shared a new video for single “A Different Kind of Love“.   

At the start of “A Different Kind of Love“ bell tolls of a detuned guitar clang out a warning. “I need a different kind of love,” Lott sings, but what reads as a self-serving plea turns on its head as the song becomes a confession.

The accompanying video is another striking piece of work, this time created by Four/Ten Media and featuring choreographer/dancer Kyle Marshall. Co-director Evan Chapman commented: “After early conversations with the band, we approached our narrative storytelling in the music video for “A Different Kind of Love” (and “Upend”) in the same manner that Son Lux does so within their music; adhering to the method of building a house around a chair instead of furnishing an existing structure from the ground up. Using the ‘Tomorrows’ trilogy album artwork (organic rocks stuck inside stark, minimalist spaces and pierced in some way by beams of light) as our “chair” around which to construct a house, we started to dream up our version of a “folk tale” that centered around our hero, choreographer/dancer and longtime collaborator Kyle Marshall, rising from the rubble of a previously destroyed hovering – almost celestial – rock. 

Because the visual motif of a beam of light piercing through rocks and rooms is so fundamental to the album artwork, we knew we wanted to incorporate that in some way in the video. We are heavily influenced by the work of Anthony McCall’s “solid-light” installations, which use heavy haze to give a tactile physicality to projected geometric shapes.”

Arriving at a time of considerable uncertainty in the world, Son Lux’s multi-album ‘Tomorrows’ is ambitious in scope and intent. Born of an active, intentional approach to shaping sound, the music reminds us of the necessity of questioning assumptions, and of sitting with the tension.

Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia, and Ian Chang train their sights on volatile principles: imbalance, disruption, collision, redefinition. But for all of its instability, Tomorrows’ exploration of breaking points and sustained frictional places is ultimately in service of something rewarding and necessary: the act of questioning, challenging, tearing down and actively rebuilding one’s own identity.

From the start, Son Lux has operated as something akin to a sonic test kitchen. The band strives to question deeply held assumptions about how music is made and re-construct it from a molecular level. What began as a solo project for founder Ryan Lott expanded in 2014, thanks to a kinship with Ian Chang and Rafiq Bhatia too strong to ignore. The trio strengthened their chemistry and honed their collective intuition while creating, releasing, and touring five recordings, including LPs Bones (2015) and Brighter Wounds (2018). A carefully cultivated musical language rooted in curiosity and balancing opposites largely eschews genre and structural conventions. 

And yet, the band remains audibly indebted to iconoclastic artists in soul, hip-hop, and experimental improvisation who themselves carved new paths forward. Distilling these varied influences, Son Lux searches for equilibrium of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions.