Pinkshift are a month away from releasing their debut album, Love Me Forever. The Baltimore-based Best New Band has shared three singles from it already — “Nothing (In My Head),” “I’m Not Crying You’re Crying,” and “Get Out.” Today, they’re back with another one, “In My Breath,” which is an outlier for the typically revved-up band: a soft piano ballad, sung with all the force of Ashrita Kumar’s incredible voice.
“‘in a breath’ is from my heart. It’s a song I’ve held on to for years. it’s a dive into my core, my greatest hopes, desires, loneliness, traumas, and fears,” she said in a statement. “It’s a song about feeling dissociated from my body and fighting to stay alive despite it. it explores the existence of an impossible reality, contemplates the existence of a god, and contemplates our capacity to love and be loved. It’s about guilt, shame, redemption, and acceptance.”
Its music video was directed by Sunny Singh, aka the hardcore videographer hate5six. “Capturing the authenticity of a live performance is what I’ve always been drawn to. It’s the space I’m most interested in exploring and refining,” he noted. “It’s also the reason why I’ve turned down every offer to do a choreographed and scripted music video.” Singh continued:
With ‘in a breath,’ I set out to create something that would allow me to render their live performance into something cinematically organic.
Ashrita’s talent as a vocalist and pianist radiates outward in this song, so I wanted to produce a visually minimalist piece that kept them at the center and instead drew its dynamics from manipulated camera motion. What emerged is an uncut, orbiting shot around them and the piano, the parallax creating a gravitational force between the viewer and Ashrita’s burning sincerity for 287 seconds.
Watch and listen below.
Love Me Forever is out 10/21 on Hopeless.
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