L.A. slowcore quartet Milly’s first new material of 2021 is the second single from their forthcoming Wish Goes On EP, due out April 9 on Dangerbird Records. “Denial” arrived Friday alongside a surreal music video, directed and animated by Mark Cheche.
Milly’s new track is sadder and more subdued than their previous Wish Goes On single “Star Thistle Blossom,” which Lizzie Manno described as “the most straightforward rock song they’ve released so far” and a “delectable wash of grunge-tinted shoegaze guitars” upon its October release. “Denial” is more of an off-speed pitch, albeit one with hooks aplenty. “Galaxies wish you well / Come back again, come back alone / Do you wish that you could come back here?” sings frontman Brendan Dyer, longing for something he can’t bring himself to acknowledge that he can’t have. “We’re gonna wish on it,” he insists over a comforting blend of acoustic and electric guitar fuzz, cymbal crashes roiling as the song crescendoes, only to collapse.
”‘Denial’ is about the idea of being fixated on something but knowing deep down it’s gone,” Dyer explains in a statement. “I was living in N.Y. at the time I wrote it and was going back and forth between there and Connecticut. I was really trying to capture the feeling of being alone and why it was hard for me to digest how that felt. My hometown spots feeling different after leaving, people moving on with their lives, etc.”
Meanwhile, the track’s accompanying visual drops Dyer into a what a press release describes as “an amalgam of psychedelic 1990s computer-generated imagery reminiscent of 32-bit videogame cutscenes and Amiga Demoscene animations of yesteryear.” Director/animator Cheche and videographer Justice Ott manage to create a blown-out, technicolor nostalgia that reflects the song’s feeling of fruitless longing for times gone by.
Watch the “Denial” video below and revisit Milly’s 2019 Paste Studio session further down.
