Pavement’s late-’90s b-side turned 2020s viral hit “Harness Your Hopes” has a new video, directed by Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell) and starring Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets). The track appears on Matador’s forthcoming 12” reissue of the band’s 1999 Spit on a Stranger EP, coming April 8 alongside a deluxe reissue of their final album, Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal.
“Harness Your Hopes” originally appeared on the Spit on a Stranger EP’s CD edition, which featured the titular Terror Twilight single and four previously unreleased tracks. It wasn’t until 2020 that the overlooked rarity somehow went viral to the tune of millions of streams, proliferating on TikTok and jumping to the top of Pavement’s most popular tracks on Spotify, thanks to an apparent leg up via the vagaries of the streamer’s algorithm.
The “Harness Your Hopes” video pays tribute to Pavement’s generation-spanning appeal, casting the 21-year-old Thatcher as something of a tour guide through the band’s classic music videos. “Whether you first heard [‘Harness Your Hopes’] as a piece of late-’90s fans-only arcana or as the soundtrack to a stranger’s dance routine, today you can experience the song again as a miniature history of Pavement on film,” as a press release puts it.
The “exhaustive” Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal features 45 tracks, including a remaster of the original album, and various b-sides, home demos, rehearsal recordings, live recordings from the era, and rough tracks from a scrapped Pavement session at Sonic Youth’s Echo Canyon studio—totaling 28 previously unreleased tracks. You can find out more and place your preorder here.
Pavement are reuniting this fall to tour the E.U. and North America. You’ll find their complete itinerary and ticket info on the band’s website.
Watch the “Harness Your Hopes” video below, plus Paste archival footage of Stephen Malkmus performing the track circa 2009, and see the details of the Spit on a Stranger EP reissue further down. You can preorder it here.
Spit on a Stranger EP Tracklist:
1. Spit on a Stranger
2. Harness Your Hopes
3. Roll With the Wind
4. The Porpoise and the Hand Grenade
5. Rooftop Gambler
6. Harness Your Hopes (Live Brixton Academy, 1999)
Spit on a Stranger EP Art:
