Wild Nothing - “To Know You” & “TV Queen” Video

Jack Tatum’s shimmering indie-rock project Wild Nothing is returning early next year with Life Of Pause, their first full-length since 2012’s Nocturne. The album was recorded over several weeks in Los Angeles and Stockholm with producer Thom Monahan; Peter Bjorn & John’s John Eriksson contributed drums and marimba, and Medicine guitarist Brad Laner and “a crew of saxophonists” also helped out. In a press release, Tatum calls the album his most “mature and honest” work to date, and this is what he has to say about it:

I desperately wanted for this to be the kind of record that would displace me. I’m terrified by the idea of being any one thing, or being of any one genre. And whether or not I accomplish that, I know that my only hope of getting there is to constantly reinvent. That reinvention doesn’t need to be drastic, but every new record has to have it’s own identity, and it has to have a separate set of goals from what came before … There’s definitely a different kind of ‘self’ in the picture this time around. There’s no real love lost, it’s much more a record of coming to terms and defining what it is that you have — your place, your relationships. I view every record as an opportunity to write better songs. At the end of the day it still sounds like me, just new.

One song from the LP, “Adore,” was debuted live earlier this year, and now the band have shared two new tracks, “To Know You” and “TV Queen,” in the form of one long music video, opening on the same image of Tatum featured in the album art. Not much actually happens, and I’m not entirely sure what any of it means — most of the second part appears to be the same as the first, just from a different perspective and with minor differences — but it is successful in creating a bizarre, slightly off-kilter atmosphere.