San Francisco shoegaze band Young Prisms are returning with their new studio album Drifter, their first new album release since 2012’s In Between. The album is out March 25 via Fire Talk, and is produced by Weekend member and Soft Kill collaborator Shaun Durkan. The band have also released a video for lead single “Honeydew,” directed by band member Giovanni Betteo and starring vocalist Stephanie Hodapp.
A press release describes the band’s long-awaited return from its sabbatical as an exploration of “the tension and release that comes with bringing your head down from the clouds to make sense of the tangible entanglements that make up everyday existence.” The band decided to regroup after nearly a decade following a rise in shoegaze’s rebirth as a genre, when it became clear that “the music they made stretched further than the course they’d assumed their band had run,” allowing the members to “reimagine the impact of their trajectory.”
In the statement, Hodapp talked about the inspiration for the single:
Growing up, my grandmother would tell me that honeydew was her favorite melon. I was never fully convinced. I usually preferred cantaloupe and quite frankly thought she was full of shit because everyone knows cantaloupe tastes better. Clearly this was more of a pitch to her unwilling granddaughter. “Honeydew” (the song) is about looking back on life and wishing for more, as if it wasn’t right or good enough. Hoping for a time machine to change history. Somehow that stubborn grandmother analogy makes sense now. A honeydew life won’t ever be a cantaloupe life, but it’s okay and can be just as satisfying if you accept it for what it is.
The song’s music video was shot in one take, inspired by the work of French New Wave filmmakers Michael Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. On the direction of the video, Betteo described wanting “to make a video that was focused on restraint especially with choreography being key and shock so prevalent. It feels like a bit of a contradiction for someone, who can’t seem to record a song without an excessive amount of filters and effects, to make a video that is in black-and-white and wholly driven by minimalism.”
Check out the “Honeydew” video below, and keep scrolling to hear Young Prisms’ 2010 Daytrotter session and see the details of Drifter. You can preorder the album here.
Drifter Artwork:
Drifter Tracklist:
01. Above Water
02. Yourside
03. Honeydew
04. This Time
05. Violet
06. If Ever Now
07. Melt Away
08. Outside Air
09. Self Love
10. Months Ago
11. Around
12. Flight
