This autumn sees Aotearoa‘s dream pop outfit French for Rabbits return with a brand new record, The Overflow. To be released on AAA records, Reckless Yes (UK) and A Modest Proposal (Italy), the album was introduced with its title track last month, showing off the band’s warmly detailed sound alongside the distinctive vocals of lead Brooke Singer. We’ve previously described the French for Rabbits style as “translucent and melancholic and alive,” their songs “the musical equivalent of a sea mist that drifts in with a beguiling hush and settles upon your skin,” and the new track was no less evocative.
While this holds true for the ‘Ouija Board’, the second single from the record, the new song also highlights a key and perhaps less acknowledged aspect of the French for Rabbits style. Because while the sound has the signature richness, there are other forces at work. Not just the strange, eerie tone of the organ or the slow, serrated guitars, but a black seam of humour too. A confrontation of dire circumstances with what could be fatalism or steely wit.
Damn my soul, it’s got so very low
There’s nowhere else to go from here but up.
Been losing mind, feels on the edge of time.
No reason or no rhyme to where we’ve gone
Cause you don’t say
You don’t say what you’re thinking.
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The track comes complete with a video which again sees the band work with Misma Andrews, as well as Martin Sagadin and Ezra Simons. Nodding to the Dada and Surrealist movements, particularly the film work of Derek Jarman, the video “paints a scene where a fanciful but bureaucratic process for traveling through worlds is carried out,” Andrews explains. An unreal film fitting for the strangeness of the song itself, where masks from Oamaru artist Donna Demente are used to introduce parallel characters and alternate realities.
The Overflow is out on the 12th November via AAA Records, Reckless Yes (UK) and A Modest Proposal (Italy).