runnner is the project of Los Angeles residents Noah Weinman and Nate Lichtenberger. Last September, the band released, awash, an kind of ramshackle folk-tinged dream pop album full of textured layers and expressive vocals.
Today we have the pleasure of unveiling the video for the album’s title track. Directed by Mike Walden and starring Charlotte Weinman, it sees a dazed protagonist on a late-night shopping trip being bombarded with images of colourful cereal boxes and psychedelic Cheerios. The protagonist seems suitably bewildered by such a display, wandering the aisles with a wide-eyed blankness, as though such noisy detail is all too much, a kind of fake, superficial layer over real life.
The track feels rich and full of life, like the woods in evening at the end of summer, guitar and banjo and percussion mingling like the chorus of nature, sleepy birds and unseen bugs weaving the wild white noise of forest floors. The yearning vocal harmonies hint at a chill in the air, the suggestion that summer won’t last much longer. But this isn’t a sad song, rather one that conjures a not-unpleasant feeling of wistful nostalgia—a kind of reflective sadness you can wrap yourself within.
You can get Awash on a name-your-price download from the runnner Bandcamp page.
Photo by Nell Sherman & Silken Weinberg